Robert Adams, the visionnaire photographer!

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Robert Adams, Untitled, 1979-1982

This is 1970 and we are in Denver, Colorado. Robert Adams, a professor in American literature at Colorado College, becomes a full time photographer when his first four prints are bought by MoMA. Fondation Cartier Bresson shows for the first time in Paris his series “Our Lives and Our Children” dedicated to the nuclear danger of the Rocky flats factories near Denver. The black and white small prints seem pretty normal. They hide a huge threat which not many artists had uncovered at the time. 

Robert Adams, Unittled, Our Lives and Our Children, 1979-1982 © Collection Centre national des arts plastiques / Photo : Yves Bresson.

Fondation Henri Cartier Bresson, is moving next October to 79 rue des Archives in the Marais and this is the last exhibition shown in the charming Montparnasse premises where it was founded in 2003, just a year before the photographer died.

The choice of Robert Adams, a great intellectual and a chronicler of American life and landscape is perfect. The small size of his photographs is well adapted to the space and the perfect timing of this show is frightening. At a time when children are killed every day in Syria and Palestine this study of daily life under the nuclear threat is particularly timely.

Robert Adams, untitled, Our Lives and Our Children, 1979-1982 © Cnap / photo : Yves Bresson

Little girls discussing in front of a shop, a mother holding her baby, kids standing on a supermarket trolley, this is life as usual on a midwest mall. Except that danger is all around. Most famous for his American landscape photographs, Robert Adams appears here as a true thinker.

Fondation Henri Cartier Bresson, 2 impasse Lebouis, Paris 14. Free entrance on Wednesday nights.

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