Robert Adams

Opening: Thursday 6 November, 6 – 9 PM 

Zander Galerie Paris is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition of works by American photographer Robert Adams. It brings together a selection of photographs from Adams’s Still Lives at Manzanita series (2004), a deeply personal body of work that reflects on memory, place, and the quiet persistence of beauty. Known for his meditative approach to the American landscape, Adams turns his gaze inward, finding meaning in the modest interiors and humble objects of everyday life.

Robert Adams (*1937) is one of the most influential photographers of his generation and a central figure in the history of American landscape photography. Working primarily in black and white, he documented the transformation of the American West under the pressure of human expansion. His work gained prominence through the landmark 1975 exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, where he challenged romantic ideals of untouched nature by revealing the environmental impact of human presence. His photographs often feature wide horizons, bright light, and minimal human presence, emphasizing silence, restraint, and contemplation. Adams’s commitment lies in photography’s potential to awaken awareness, not through spectacle, but through stillness.

Still Lives at Manzanita marks a return to the Oregon coast where Adams’s parents lived, at the base of Neahkahnie Mountain. During visits to this place of personal significance, Adams made a series of intimate still lifes: simple arrangements of fruits, and everyday objects photographed on motel tables and kitchen counters. The photographs reveal Adams’s mastery of light, transforming ordinary materials into subjects of quiet contemplation. Shadows, textures, and the delicate geometry of natural forms evoke a sense of timelessness and introspection. Affinities with Paul Cézanne in Adams’s compositional clarity and his attention to the subtleties of tone and form can be found. Still Lives at Manzanita offer a meditation on intimacy, memory, and the passage of time. The everyday objects depicted become vessels of remembrance, their simplicity elevated to poetry. 

Robert Adams’s work has been widely exhibited and is held in the permanent collections of institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Sprengel Museum, Hanover; and the Fondation Cartier, Paris. He has been the subject of major retrospectives at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Haus der Kunst, Munich; and the Josef Albers Museum, Bottrop. He is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including the Hasselblad Award, 2009; a MacArthur Fellowship, and multiple Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships.

On view from 6 November to 13 December 2025, the exhibition is part of the PhotoSaintGermain festival.

Press release (French)