Bryan Adams began making the portraits in American Women in November 2003, photographing primarily in New York and Los Angeles through 2004. Published by powerHouse Books in 2005, the project gathers prominent American women from politics, journalism, film, literature, music, business, sport, art, and philanthropy. Its subjects include Hillary Rodham Clinton, Katie Couric, Jennifer Aniston, Alice Sebold, Eartha Kitt, Serena and Venus Williams, and Gwyneth Paltrow.

The book’s premise is deliberately focused: each sitter was recognized for achievement in her field, while new and vintage Calvin Klein clothing supplies a shared visual framework. Produced in close collaboration with Calvin Klein, Inc., the photographs bring fashion and public portraiture into the same space. The wardrobe establishes continuity without erasing the distinctions among occupations, generations, and public identities represented by the group.

American Women also belongs to a longer sequence in Adams’s work. It was his third publication devoted to portraits of influential women, following Made in Canada and Haven. As with those earlier projects, the book connected portrait-making to support for breast-cancer causes; proceeds from this volume were designated for research programs at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center through the Society of MSKCC. That context gives the project a purpose beyond the presentation of celebrity, linking the visibility of its sitters to a defined philanthropic commitment.

For collectors, the book merits attention as a concentrated record of an early phase of Adams’s photographic publishing and as a distinctly mid-2000s meeting of editorial portraiture, fashion, and public achievement. Its significance lies not in any single famous face, but in the breadth of professions assembled under one consistent premise. The resulting group portrait offers a revealing account of which forms of female accomplishment were being placed before a broad cultural audience at the time.