In 1960 while at Redlands, he met and married Kerstin Mornestam, a Swedish native, who shared the same interest in the arts and nature. He continued his graduate studies at the University of Southern California and received his PhD in English Literature, in 1965.

Īdams enrolled in the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1955, and attended it for his first year, but decided to transfer the next year to the University of Redlands in California where he received his B.A. He and his sister began visiting Denver Art Museum. He also took trips on pack horses and went mountain climbing. He and his father made several raft trips through Dinosaur National Monument, and during his adolescent years he worked at boys' camps at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. He was an active Boy Scout, and was also active with the Methodist church that his family attended. He also enjoyed playing baseball in open fields and working with his father on carpentry projects. ĭuring his childhood, Adams often accompanied his father on walks and hikes through the woods on Sunday afternoons. He continued to suffer from asthma and allergy problems. They moved to Colorado partly because of the chronic bronchial problems that he suffered from in Madison, New Jersey around age 5 as an attempt to help alleviate those problems. They moved one last time, in 1952, to Wheat Ridge, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, when his father secured a job in Denver. Then in 1947 they moved to Madison, Wisconsin for five years, where he contracted polio at age 12 in 1949 in his back, left arm, and hand but was able to recover.

In 1940 the family moved to Madison, New Jersey where his younger sister Carolyn was born. Robert Hickman Adams was born on May 8, 1937, in Orange, New Jersey to Lois Hickman Adams and Ross Adams.

He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and the Hasselblad Award. His work first came to prominence in the mid-1970s through his book The New West (1974) and his participation in the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975. Robert Adams (born May 8, 1937) is an American photographer who has focused on the changing landscape of the American West. For other persons named Robert Adams, see Robert Adams (disambiguation).

Adams photograph