Artist

Robert Dawson

born Sacramento, CA 1950
Also known as
  • Robert Holden Dawson
Born
Sacramento, California, United States
Active in
  • San Francisco, California, United States
Biography

Born in Sacramento, California, 1950. Currently resides in San Francisco. Dawson teaches at San Francisco State University and San Jose State University. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1984 and 1988. Recent solo exhibitions of his work inclue a show at the Gallery Min, Tokyo, Japan (1988). Since 1983 he has been co-director of the Water in the West Project, a collaborative photographic exploration of our culture's relationship to, and use of, water in the arid lands of the American West. Recent publications include The Great Central Valley Project (University of California Press, 1989) and Robert Dawson Photographs (Gallery Min, Tokyo, Japan, 1988).

Merry A. Foresta, Stephen Jay Gould, and Karal Ann Marling Between Home and Heaven: Contemporary American Landscape Photography (Washington, D.C. and Albuquerque, New Mexico: The National Museum of American Art in association with the University of New Mexico Press, 1992)

Related Books

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The Land Through a Lens: Highlights from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
A prolific landscape record evolved as soon as cameras and equipment could be reliably used outdoors. Most nineteenth-century photographers worked on government-sponsored surveys. Others helped to lure investors westward with the images they made along the routes of the railroads. At the same time, Americans were hanging framed images by such photographic artists as Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge on their parlor walls. Photographs of unspoiled national treasures such as those by Ansel Adams exerted considerable influence on the federal government’s efforts to create national parks. Modern and contemporary photographers have recorded their impressions of both man’s and nature’s impact on the land, from Robert Dawson’s images of polluted waterways to Emmet Gowin’s views of the aftermath of Mount St. Helens’s spectacular eruption.