American photographer Robert Adams wins Hasselblad Award

Apr 15, 2009, 7:29 GMT

Stockholm - American photographer Robert Adams, known for his black and white photographs of the American West, was Wednesday named winner of the 2009 Hasselblad Award.

Adams received the award worth 500,000 kronor (60,000 dollars) along with a diploma and a gold medal on Tuesday in San Francisco, Bo Myhrman, managing director of the Hasselblad Foundation that funds the prize, said.

A five-member international panel cited Adams as 'one of the most important and influential photographers of the last 40 years.'

The jury said that 'as photography has altered and fragmented, he (Adams) has refined and reaffirmed its inherent language, adapting the legacies of 19th century and modernist photography to his own very singular purpose. Precise and undramatic.'

His work was 'a formidable document, reflecting broader, global concerns about the environment,' the jury said.

Adams was born in 1937 in Orange, New Jersey in the US. He has for many years lived and worked in Oregon, in the north-west of the country.

His numerous awards include the 1994 John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation Award and the Deutsche Boerse Photography Prize (2006).

He has published several books including The New West (1974), From the Missouri West (1980), and Turning Back (2005).

An exhibition on his work was to open November 6 at the Hasselblad Centre in the Swedish west coast city of Gothenburg.

The Hasselblad Centre and award were named after Victor Hasselblad (1906-1978) who invented the Hasselblad cameras that have been used in NASA space programmes and by a number of famed photographers.

Former Hasselblad Award winners include Robert Frank, Josef Koudelka, Richard Avedon, Sebastiao Salgado, Hiroshi Hamaya, Susan Meiselas, Ernst Haas, Irving Penn, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams, and Lennart Nilsson. In 2007 it was awarded to Nan Goldin of the United States and last year to Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide.

More information can be found on: www.hasselbladfoundation.org.