Mr. Dawson's photographs of the American West have been recognized by a Visual Artists Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Ruttenberg Fellowship from The Friends of Photography, a Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University (with Gray Brechin) and several other major grants, awards, and fellowships. 

       His books include Robert Dawson Photographs (Gallery MIN, Tokyo, 1988), The Great Central Valley: California's Heartland by Robert Dawson and Steve Johnson and Gerald Haslam (University of California Press, 1993), Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream with Gray Brechin (University of California Press, 1999), A Doubtful River with Peter Goin and Mary Webb (University of Nevada Press, 2000). Portfolios of his work have been published in Aperture #120 "Beyond Wilderness" and Between Home and Heaven: Contemporary American Landscape Photography (Smithsonian Institution, 1992).       

       He is founder and co-director with his wife Ellen Manchester of the Water in the West Project, a large-scale collaboration with several other photographers and advisors. Work from the project was published in A River Too Far: The Past and Future of the Arid West (University of Nevada Press, 1991) and  Arid Waters: Photographs From the Water in the West Project (University of Nevada Press, 1992).  An archive of the Water in the West project is in the permanent collection of the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

       Mr. Dawson's photographs are in several other permanent collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  

       A native of Sacramento, California,  Mr. Dawson received his B.A. from the University of California at Santa Cruz and his M.A. from San Francisco State University. He is currently an instructor of photography at Stanford University and San Jose State University.  He resides in San Francisco with his wife Ellen Manchester, and son Walker Manchester Dawson.