What We Bought: The New World Scenes From the Metropolitan Area, 1970-1974 (2009)

After working on his seminal book The New West, American photographer Robert Adams narrowed his focus to the rapidly developing landscape of Denver. The majority of the pictures from this later effort remained unpublished for more than two decades until, as the result of an unexpected German prize, they were brought out as an unbroken sequence of 193 images in What We Bought: The New World. In the book, Adams begins at the grassy outskirts of the city and ends at his own front door, passing by scenes of heartbreaking compromise in the city’s streets, offices, shopping centers, and suburban developments. “The pictures record what we purchased, what we paid, and what we could not buy,” Adams writes in his introduction. “They document a separation from ourselves, and in turn from the natural world that we professed to love.”

This second edition of What We Bought: The New World: Scenes from the Denver Metropolitan Area, 1970–1974 is published to coincide with a revised edition of its precursor, denver: A Photographic Survey of the Metropolitan Area, 1970–1974. These books, previously out of print, are among the most important in Adams’s body of work.