Robert Dawson

Robert Dawson is founder and co-director of the Water in the West Project. His photographs have been recognized by a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and artist’s grants from the Graham Foundation and the Creative Work Fund. Other awards include a National Endowment For the Arts Fellowship and a Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize. His books include Robert Dawson Photographs (1988); and, as co-author, The Great Central Valley: California’s Heartland (1993), Farewell, Promised Land: Waking From the California Dream (1999), and A Doubtful River (2000). His latest book, The Public Library: A Photographic Survey (2014) was published by Princeton Architectural Press and included a forward by Bill Moyers and an afterword by Ann Patchett. In 2015, the Library of Congress purchased this entire project for their permanent archive. Dawson’s photographs are also in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Museum of American Art (Smithsonian Institution); and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He received his B.A. from the University of California at Santa Cruz and his M.A. from San Francisco State University. He has been an Instructor of Photography at San Jose State University since 1986 (now retired) and an Instructor of Photography at Stanford University since 1996.