Gone?

Robert Adams calls Gone? his most personal book: a return to the semi-rural stretch of Colorado where he grew up, photographed decades after he first left it.

The 116-page volume collects 119 black-and-white photographs of the Front Range foothills, land Adams had already documented as it filled with tract housing in the 1970s. Here he goes back to what is left of the open country of his childhood, framing subdivisions, scrub, and irrigation ditches with the same unhurried attention he once gave to unbroken plains. Adams has described photography as a melancholy vocation, and this book carries that weight directly, revisiting a landscape that keeps being taken away while insisting that something of its light survives.

Adams built his reputation on exactly this kind of return: to the American West as a site of loss and habitation both, first in The New West and across the decades that followed. Gone? closes that arc on the ground where it started, published by Steidl in 2010 as a cloth-bound hardcover.