“Although Robert Adams's book does not moralise, it does have a moral. Its moral is that the landscape is, for us, the place where we live.” — John Szarkowski
 
 
 
The open American West has almost disappeared. The New West is a photographic essay on what has filled it: highways, housing, low-rise commercial buildings and signs. In five sequences of photographs taken along Colorado's Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, Robert Adams documents a representative cross-section of the suburban Southwest. These views have a double power. At first they shock; we usually try to forget the commercial squalor they depict. Gradually, however, they reveal aspects of geography — the shape of the land itself, for example — that lie beyond human reach. Adams has written that “all land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty”, and his photographs demonstrate this.
 
 
 
Originally published in 1974, The New West is now regarded as a classic, alongside Walker Evans's American Photographs and Robert Frank's The Americans in the pantheon of landmark photographic volumes exploring American culture and society. This new edition marks the book's fortieth anniversary and the beginning of Steidl's long-term commitment to publishing Robert Adams's remarkable body of work in its entirety.