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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."
Robert Adams Born in Orange, New Jersey in 1937, Robert Adams earned a doctorate degree in English from the University of Southern California. Before becoming a photographer he worked for eight years as a college English professor. His photographs, most of which record the development of the modern American West, have been widely collected, exhibited, reproduced, and honored, earning him two awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Charles Pratt Memorial Award in 1987. Among Robert Adams's many writings and monographs are those published by Aperture: From the Missouri West (1980), Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values (1981), Our Lives and Our Children (1983), Summer Nights (1985), Los Angeles Spring (1986), and Perfect Times, Perfect Places (1988). Adams's work has been exhibited by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum, the Amon Carter Museum of Fort Worth, and the Colorado History Museum, Denver. |