The Place We Live. A Retrospective Selection of Photographs 1964-2009. 3 Vols

New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 2010. First edition. Hardcover. New in publisher's shipping box.. Small Folio. Original cream cloth with blind-stamped lettering on covers, blue on spine, in original gray, respectively blue dustjackets, photo-illustrated on back covers, housed in original printed publisher's white cardboard box. Cream textured endpapers. Frontispiece photographs. The set contains six hundred and seventy-five tritone plates.

"The title is taken from John Szarkowski's foreword to The New West (1974). He wrote that the moral of the book is that "the landscape is, for us, the place we live. If we have used it badly, we cannot therefore scorn it, without scorning ourselves. If we abused it, broken its health, and erected upon it memorials to our ignorance, it is still our place, and before we can proceed we must learn to love it." (Preface)

Adams considers any retrospective book as part of an autobiography. He cites the German poet Hölderlin "To live is to defend a form," suggesting this might serve as an epigraph, a record of our effort in the pursuit of harmony. The 20th century he sees as especially inimical to art, emphasizing in Hugh MacDiarmid's words "like a growth of weeds on the side of a demolished building." "Autobiography returns again and again to the same question: For what did the author risk everything? Were there intolerable events? Was there promise? Was there some person, season, or book? Some tree or road? (Adams).

This retrospective selection is "precise and undramatic, Adam's accumulative vision of the West now stands as a formidable document, reflecting broader, global concerns about the environment, while consistently recognizing signs of human aspiration and elements of hope across a particular changing landscape." (From the citation accompanying the 2009 Hasselblad). Sealed in printed publisher's box.