“To what extent can we love the developing American West?” photographer Robert Adams asked in the forwward to his 2003 book “Commercial/Residential: Landscapes along the Colorado Front Range, 1968–1972.”

Over the course of the last 40 years Adams has had an answer: Too much.

As is revealed in “Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs” at the Denver Art Museum and in a three-volume publication of the same title, that’s a question-and-answer in which Adams has been interested for 45 years. This new exhibition and book, organized and edited by Joshua Chuang and Jock Reynolds for the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale University Press and installed here by DAM’s Eric Paddock, delivers a broad, inclusive look at Adams’ career, fully revealing him as one of America’s most important photographers. That’s clearly the intent of the enterprise: Denver is the second stop of what will be at least a nine-venue, seven-nation, nearly four-year tour. The exhibition will be on view in Denver through January 1, 2012. It is almost certainly the most thorough look at Adams’ work ever presented.

Typically Adams is presented as the New Topographic photographer most interested in America’s race to subdivide the West. For a portion of his career, he probably was: When I hear Don Henley sing, ”Some rich men came to rape the land, nobody caught em; Put up a bunch of ugly boxes, and Jesus, people bought ‘em,” in the Eagles’ 1976 “The Last Resort,” I picture “The New West” (1968-1971), Adams’ best-known series and its follow-up “What We Bought” (1970-74). Adams showed how the land was flattened, subdivided, paved and covered with ugly boxes in ways that obscured and despoiled the very landscape that motivated millions of people to move West. The target of Adams’s critique seemed to be policy rather than the individuals who moved West; after all, Adams was born in New Jersey and he and his parents didn’t move to Colorado until Adams was 15. He was part of the migration that built up the land.

While it’s the New Topos-era Adamses that usually receive the most attention, this exhibition emphasizes that Adams has taken care to make sure that’s not all he does. In particular, it places much emphasis on Adams’s investigation of why he loves the West. For every “Los Angeles Spring,” a 1979-83 series of photographs of beautiful southern California vistas partially spoiled by development or trash, Adams offers up “The Pacific,” a decade’s worth of romantic pictures of the Pacific Ocean and its beaches. As a result we understand that Adams hasn’t just delivered a polemical grimace at what has happened to the land, but that’s he’s spent four decades creating something more like a photo-based letter to a young Westerner, reminding him what we’ve done to the land — and that there are many, many beautiful reasons to take better care of our most spectacular landscapes. [Image: Adams, On Signal Hill, overlooking Long Beach, California, from the series "Los Angeles Spring," 1979-1983.]

The exhibition opens with “The Plains,” (1965-73), a series of photographs that Adams took of farm land and small settlements such as Calhan, Keota, and Simla, towns well east of the Rockies on the flat, high Colorado plains.  Adams pictures are full of quiet respect for the folk who live here and work the land. One photograph lovingly shows a John Deere dealership, another a movie theater that’s not much bigger than a couple of minivans parked next to each other. Methodist church, Bowen Colorado [at left] is characteristic of Adams’ work from the period, the print’s white-to-grey-to-darks crafted in a careful, loving way that suggests Adams sees the same qualities in the folks who make a go of it in remote Bowen, a now-abandoned coal-mining town five miles north of Trinidad, Colo.

With Eden, Colorado (1968, at the top of this post), Adams begins to focus on his critique of development. The town of Eden was named after a railroad official and not the Biblical paradise, and both references serve Adams’ purpose. Shortly after Eden, Adams takes a picture of an empty flatbed behind a big rig, with power lines and telephone poles in the background. It’s a premonition of what’s coming next: Inexpensive subdivisions and millions of people.

Throughout his work, Adams seems perplexed, almost amused, at people who have come to Colorado only to bask in the same suburbia they could have found outside, say, Houston. In Sunday-school class, Colorado Springs, Colorado, part of Adams’s landmark “The New West” series (1968-71) Adams photographs a group of people who have decided to hold Sunday school outside… but who have chosen to sit so close to their church that the building obscures their incredible view of the Rocky Mountains. It’s one of Adams’s very best pictures.

For much of the next decade, Adams focused on photographing examples of our land-use, but in 1975 he seems to have realized that he wanted to also show examples of why he loves the land. With the series “From the Missouri West,” (1975-83) Adams leaves man’s impact for more traditional, loving landscape photography. It would be a practice he’d continue for the rest of his career, though in recent series such as “Along Some Rivers,” (1984-87) and “Sea Stories, This Day” (1999-2009) the nature pictures take precedence.

The exception is “Turning Back,” Adams’s 1999-2003 series about clear-cutting and the destruction of old-growth forests by the timber industry. The pictures of clear-cut patches of land, stumps and logging detritus are the most intense pictures Adams has made. They are pictures of plunder, so violent that they can best be described as showing corporate warfare against nature. Virtually every picture in the series is affecting, but none moreso than Coos County, Oregon, which shows a tree stump with ‘arms’ outcast. It recalls a crucifixion scene and directly suggests that this forest died to fuel our sins.

At the same time Adams was photographing clear-cut landscapes, he made “Poplars” (1999) and “Pine Valley” (1999-2003), which are both full of beautiful trees. I suspect for Adams the work was a restorative. For us too.

Related: The exhibition website that YUAG created is fantastic. It features almost every series and every photograph in the exhibition, plus some of the texts. I’ve linked to it throughout this post.