Bobby Neel Adams is an American artist who shows how photography can be an artistic medium to talk about science; for example the transmission of the genome or the mutation of nature. He was born in Black Mountain, North Carolina and now resides in New York. His work is held in many collections such as Greenville County Museum of Art, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, International Center for Photography, Anne McDonald / ARTSPACE, and has been shown nationally and internationally winning numerous Grants.
Much of Adams’ photographic work addresses the transformation of the human body and its appearance by aging. He often shows the differences between the youth and the old age; emphasizing facial features altered by the passage of time.
One of his most important artworks is Family Tree, an old project on which Adams returned in 2007, photographing immediate family members individually and combining their portraits into one picture. He calls this technique “Photo-surgery” a term he coined in the 1980’s. The Family Tree series shows the visual DNA passed down from father to son and from mother to daughter. Contrary to the “biotech” trend, he has chosen to show that science and art can overlap without doing the effective manipulation of the living creatures, like the biotech artists as Eduardo Kac or Marta De Menezez.
So, although he shares similar inspiration with other practices, his cannot be labeled “biotech” or “new media”.