Robert Adams: Summer Nights, Walking

By Robert Adams

A beloved Robert Adams photobook, now in an expanded edition

In the mid-1970s, Robert Adams (born 1937) began recording nocturnal scenes near his former home in Longmont, Colorado. Illuminated by moonlight and streetlamp, suburban houses, roads, sidewalks and fields seemed utterly transfigured. "What attracted me to the subjects at a new hour," observed Adams, "was the discovery then of a neglected peace."

Twenty-five years after first publishing a sequence of these pictures in 1985 as Summer Nights, he revisited his project, amending its title while completely resequencing and adding to its contents to create a more disquieting and thus more accurate reflection of his experience. Hailed as a new classic, Summer Nights, Walking went out of print soon after it was published in 2009. This sensitively expanded edition, printed with the same exquisite care as the original, makes this revered body of work available to a new audience.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 395829684X
• ISBN13: 9783958296848
• Release Date: December 2023
• Publisher: Steidl
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 10.2" x 10.3"

Customer Reviews

Beautiful Book

There will always be visually illiterate people who blame Robert Adams when they don't get his work. Don't cheat yourself by listening to these knee-jerk voices. Adams' images deserve better. They are subtle, quiet, personal, intricate, and interrelated. They do not reveal all their secrets quickly; they may not reveal them at all if you expect to absorb everything in the flash of a first glance, or if you expect the pictures to tell you outright what they mean. His pictures are for slow, quiet viewing, for approaching with curiosity and opennenss. Of all of his bodies of work (and there are many), Summer Nights strikes me as the most accessible. Some of his other work may seem cold and intellectual at first glance (it isn't, but still might seem that way, especially if you're used to more romanic, dramatic pictures of the landscape). But summer nights is immediately inviting. Among other things, it's about simple pleasures of simple experiences, in places close to home. There's something here for anyone willing to take the time to sit still and really look.

Between dreanming and Waking

Robert Adams' 'Summer Nights' has for me, been a seminal work in my development as an artist. The images in this book are evocative and powerful, yet plain and quiet. The book format and the sequencing of the images lend well to Mr Adams' style and subject matter. The quiet poetry of his night and evening journeys are a great begining and understanding into Mr Adams' work and ideas. This is one book that should have been republished many years ago!