“To what extent can we love the developing American West? We know the urgency of that question because bitterness has sometimes made us exiles. My first attempt to describe the region in a book (The New West, 1974) omitted pictures that might have helped. I am grateful now to be able to reproduce them. They record a geography that is still in some respects characteristic, one where we could do better but where the rest is faultless.At about the time I took the pictures I read an interview with Raoul Coutard, Jean-Luc Godard’s cameraman. In it Coutard noted with gratitude that ‘daylight has an inhuman faculty for always being perfect.’ It is one of the mercies, I believe, by which each of us is allowed to live.” –Robert Adams, from Commercial/Residential