Robert Adams: Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews

A now classic text on the art, Why People Photograph gathers a selection of essays by the great master photographer Robert Adams, tackling such diverse subjects as collectors, humor, teaching, money and dogs. Adams also writes brilliantly on Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Laura Gilpin, Judith Joy Ross, Susan Meiselas, Michael Schmidt, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and Eugène Atget. The book closes with two essays on "working conditions" in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American West, and the essay "Two Landscapes." Adams writes: At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are.

Why People Photograph. Selected essays and reviews by Robert Adams. "At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are." 32 blackandwhite photographs, 5 1/2 X 8 1/4, 192 pages. paperback;

"Adams writes with a clarity unusual in the art world and with an intelligence that ranges widely,literature, politics, American history, the history of photography and painting, religion, Native American culture all are brought to bear on his feelings about photography and it's role in contemporary culture. Adams' writing is simply clear. He is as careful with his sentences as he is with the composition of his photographsa true parallel existing between the structure of his writing and that of his visual work: both I think finally set out to reveal in simple and transparent ways the wholeness of a complex idea."

Peter Brown, The Houston Center for Photography

"First in Beauty in Photography, and now in Why People Photograph, Adams has addressed issues facing 'straight' photography in a manner that is sober, thoughtful, eminently reasonable, and which strives always for accessibility and clarity of expression."

Bruce NiXon, Artweek

Why People Photograph is a book by a professional photographer about the relationship of art and life. 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." This critically acclaimed work brings us a new selection of poignant essays by master photographer Robert Adams. In this volume, Adams evinces his firm belief in the importance of art. Photographers "may or may not make a living by photography," he writes, "but they are alive by it."