Travels east with Kerstin to find an audience for his pictures of the new Western landscape. Meets John Szarkowski, Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the museum subsequently buys four prints. Adams returns to work with renewed commitment. View map used by the Adamses while traveling and photographing in northeastern Colorado.

In the spring, teaches for the last time. In the fall, begins a year in Denver so that Kerstin can earn a master's degree in library science at the University of Denver. Maintains an active schedule of photographing in Denver. “Whatever power there is in the urban pictures is bound to the closeness with which they skirt banality. For a shot to be good—suggestive of more than just what it is—it has to come perilously near being bad, just a view of stuff.” “The praise I like to hear most is that the photographs make people think of taking pictures themselves. It implies it looks easy, which it should.” —From notes made in 1970

Pictures are rejected for publication for a third time by Aperture. Publishes White Churches of the Plains.