In the fall of 1968, Robert Adams, a college English teacher, found himself inexplicably drawn to photograph a nondescript area south of Colorado Springs whose most notable feature was a truck stop off the interstate. Unflinching in their description yet embodying a mysteriously radiant peace, the pictures Adams made of the otherwise graceless site confirmed for him a vital new way of relating to the world. He would parlay this revelation into The New West, the book that would establish both his photographs and his subject-the contemporary landscape of the American frontier-as matters of wider consequence. This pivotal early series has been re-edited to include previously unpublished pictures from the period.

Robert Adams was born in 1937 in Orange, New Jersey. After earning a PhD in English literature and teaching the subject for several years at Colorado College, he became a photographer in the mid-1960s. Adams has published more than 40 books of photographs, with the changing landscape of the American West as his primary subject; his books with Steidl include Gone? (2009), The Place We Live (2013) and From the Missouri West (2018). Adams lives and works with his wife in northwest Oregon.