Agemaps By Bobby Neel Adams

Bobby Neel Adams was born in Black Mountain, North Carolina and now resides in New York. After graduating from Goddard College in Vermont he moved to San Francisco where he resided and worked for the next eighteen years. Much of Adams' photographic work addresses the transformation of the human body by aging and circumstance. In the late 1980s he began using a photomontage technique he termed photo-surgery, in which photographs were altered through manual excision, collage, and sometime defacing of the subject. These projects included the series AgeMaps, FamilyTree, and Couples.
Over the last twenty years Adams has photographed temples and artifacts in Burma, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam. A selection of these photographs is featured in The Buddha book (1997). In 1992 Adams began a portrait project titled Broken Wings. The subjects of these photographs were all victims of the landmine a nasty weapon designed to main rather than kill. In 1997 a small book of these portraits was published and exhibited by The Greenville Museum of Art and at the International Center for Photography among other venues.