Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values

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Aperture, 1989 - Photography - 108 pages
"These essays address us in the quiet voice of a working photographer, an artist and craftsman who has thought long and seriously about his endeavor, who has tested and questioned his own assumptions in the light of actual practice. The result is a rare book of criticism, one that is alive to the pleasure and mysteries of true exploration. Written over a ten-year period, and originally published in 1981, this timeless collection of writings now includes a new preface by the author. Robert Adams possesses the wit to avoid cant, dogma, and platitudes of the scholar that can deaden our responses to the lively business of art. His eight essays pose a host of questions about photography's place in the arts--and in our lives: How is photography art? Of what importance is it to society? By what standards are we to judge the success or failure of a photograph? His reflections are delicate, unusually calm, but they also carry the force of sure conviction, the passion of absolute dedication. Few visual artists are capable of articulating the subtle, potent wellsprings of their own creative achievement. Adams does so with extraordinary grace and power. This book offers not only an insight into the work of a distinguished photographer, but also an illuminating challenge and corrective to the usual pieties and pettiness of photographic circumstance of today." -- Provided by publisher

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About the author (1989)

Robert Adams (born in Orange, New Jersey, 1937), one of America's foremost living photographers, has spent decades considering and documenting the landscape of the Amer­ican West and the ways it has been altered, disturbed, or destroyed by humankind. A professor of English before turn­ing to photography, Adams is also a skilled writer and acute thinker on aesthetic questions. He is recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Adams's work has been shown widely, including in major exhibitions at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; Phil­adelphia Museum of Art; and Museum of Modern Art, New York. His other Aperture books include Beauty in Photography; (first edition, 1981; second edition, 1996; reissued 2023), Summer Nights (1985), Why People Photograph (1994, reissued 2023), Along Some Rivers: Photographs and Conversations (2006), Summer Nights, Walking (2009, copublished with Yale Uni­versity Art Gallery), and American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams (2021, copublished with the National Gallery of Art).

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