Adams wins Hasselblad Award

Photographer Robert Adams has won the 2009 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography, organizers announced on Wednesday, April 15. Adams, 71, accepted the award in San Francisco on Tuesday, April 14. He was given 500,000 kronor (equivalent to $60,000) a diploma, and a gold medal at the joint news conference and awards ceremony.

“Robert Adams is one of the most important and influential photographers of the last forty years. During that time he has worked almost exclusively in the American West, and, as photography has altered and fragmented, he has refined and reaffirmed its inherent language, adapting the legacies of nineteenth century and modernist photography to his own very singular purpose,” cited the Foundation on its Web site.

Adams has carefully documented the impact of human activity on the land—not to condemn it but to find in its often tragic overtones something of what he has called the “persistent beauty” in the way the earth adapts and heals itself. Adams’s works include The New West and New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.

An exhibition of Adams’ photographs will open on Nov. 6 at the Foundation’s

exhibition hall at the Göteborg Museum of Art.

The Hasselblad Foundation was established in 1979 under the terms of the last will and testament of Dr. Victor Hasselblad and his wife Erna. The purpose of the Foundation is to promote scientific education and research in the natural sciences and photography.

by Kevin Fuller

Comments