Prairie

Since the 1970s, photographer Robert Adams (b. 1937) has chronicled the changing landscape of the American West, from the growth of cities like Denver to the seemingly unconquerable openness of the Great Plains—the subject of Adams’s Prairie. The first edition of Prairie, published in 1978, is now a sought-after collector’s item; this expanded volume will include all of those original images, along with new photographs selected and sequenced by Adams himself, many of which are being published for the first time.

Informed by a dedication to ecological principles, Adams’s photographs offer an unsentimental view of the American wilderness—paying tribute both to its natural beauty and to the infrastructure of life on the land: farmhouses, gravel roads, and furrowed fields. This future collector’s item, with 45 tritone reproductions, stands as a monument to Adams’s work, and a poignant reminder of the quiet but profound ways in which our habitation of the land alters it.