Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews

Front Cover
Aperture, 1994 - Photography - 186 pages
In 1981 Robert Adams published a volume of essays entitled Beauty in Photography, in which he suggested that art is too important to confuse with interior decoration or an investment opportunity. Its real use, he contended, is to affirm meaning and thus to keep intact an affection for life. Why People Photograph gathers a selection of Adams's writing since then. His subjects vary, but again he questions accepted prejudice, this time not only the view that art is trivial but that artists are separate. He demonstrates that many understand themselves to be bound to the world by complex and important obligations. Adams's writing is free of academic jargon. Readers will also appreciate his attention to common experience (he talks about trying to earn an income), his enjoyment of the unorthodox (one essay concerns dogs and photography), and above all his conviction that art matters. Photographers may or may not make a living by photography, he writes, but they are alive by it.

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Contents

Colleagues
13
Humor
21
Collectors
29
Copyright

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About the author (1994)

Robert Adams is a major figure in New Topographics movement known for his photographs of the modern American West. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Spectrum International Prize for Photography, and the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, his many books include: From the Missouri West (1980), Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values (1981), Our Lives and Our Children (1983), Summer Nights, Walking (1985), Los Angeles Spring (1986), and Perfect Times, Perfect Places (1988). Adams's work has been widely exhibited, including in a major retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

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