Customer Reviews

Robert Adams: Beauty In Photography

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For me, there are two key assertions in Robert Adams' "Beauty in Photography". First, that we "live in discouraging hours of society's apparent decay" (p. 88). Second, that the purpose of art is to "help us meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life may be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning" (p. 25).

From these two assertions Adams develops his interpretation of photography: Photography detects, extracts and emphasizes the beauty around us, and by doing so it points toward something deeper in the world, an organizing power, a coherence supporting the world and our lifes. To Adams, photography is a spiritual exercise, making bearable an otherwise decaying sourrounding.

Art not concerned with depicting the world beautifully is, to Adams, mere "decoration". Thus, Adams tells us little interesting about most modern art, and his approach does not generalize, for instance, to music. That beauty can exist as such, that it can tell us something about ourselves even without refering to things in the world: This does not seem to be Adams experience.

In these very conservative views I disagree with Adams. Still, I recommend his essays to anyone who wants to understand why some photography is moving us while other is not. Even if Adams is not telling the whole story -probably nobody will- he is an excellent writer who talks about art in a clear and understandable way.

The only disappointment with the book was the poor reproduction quality of the images depicted. As a publisher specializing in photography books Aperture could do better.

This is really a book-let, something of a size common in old European Schools. The views expressed are honest but conservative, and overall its clear that the author lives in a somewhat "safe" academic environment and likes to resort to the standard referral method of using other photographers as setters of standards or at least, a base of reference. But, he does it knowingly and cracks at least one joke about it. It makes a very good read, and I worked my way through it in less than an hour. I would place it in a category perhaps of a "Zen of Photography" reading. For those photographers who are full of themselves this booklet will do no good. For those who perhaps, like to go on photographic quests, and thusly often question what they are doing, this book is a good read. The images shown are small and just act to prop up the essays, so they don't need to be supreme works of the printing art.

A good buy for the student and the expert alike.

I found that various topics Adams discussed in his book, for instance, "What is beauty?", "How do you make art new?", "Can you photograph evil?", insightful and highly relevant even though it was written in the age of film. I read his essays again and again when I want to reflect on my photography.

If I had to quote, this would be one that I love most:

"Most of the pictures (in mass circulation photography magazines) suggest embarrassing strain: odd angles, extreme lenses, and eccentric darkroom techniques reveal a struggle to substitute shock and technology for sight." -Robert Adams

That is so relevant in the age of digital photography.

This slender volume is my favorite among the many books I have read on photography - a subject about which I have found it frustratingly hard to find good, clear writing. This is a book to be read, marked up, reread, savored. Adams cuts to the heart of not only photography, but art in general. He is an outstanding writer - clear, unambiguous, and refreshingly free of jargon. Some may understandably fault the low-end quality of the photographic reproductions, but I found them sufficient to get the points across. The interested reader can seek out better quality versions of those photographers' works; this is not a book of photographs but one about photographs.

This is an important collection of essays for the serious photographer and for anyone interested in the art of photography. This book is destined to become a classic and will be read a hundred years from now. Adams' many excellent books of his own photography are testimony to the validity of what he writes about. I have read these essays over and over again and continue to learn. Robert Adams is one of the few photographers whose writing matches his photography.

The beauty of the essays reinstates that each and every frame/image has its own value. It gives the warmth and feeling while reading the essays. Robert Adams, like his photography writes as well eloquently.

A great read for anyone who is more than interested in photography. For those who have given this low reviews, I recommend reading this book, and then read it again and again and again. One day you will be out making photographs and it will click.

In an essay in this little book, entitled "Civilizing Criticism", Robert Adams cites Henry James as asking of a work of art "What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing?" I had to guess at what Adams was trying to do; if I guessed correctly, it was worth doing; he didn't do it.

Adams, who was born in 1937, was and probably still is an American landscape photographer. This series of short essays was originally published in 1981 and has now been republished. The essays range in title from "Truth and Landscape" to "Photographing Evil". I am reluctant to describe the contents further because I found it hard to follow the author's reasoning or extract a theme from most of the essays. The author writes with good grammar but his rhetoric seemed weak to me. Perhaps this was a failing on my part, but I read most of the essays twice and still failed to grasp them.

Consider the first essay. Adams seems to say that we are disappointed by the American landscape because it has been despoiled. I'm not going to deny that the littered beaches of Long Island are not as beautiful as they once were. But after watching the sunrise from Cadillac Mountain in Maine and rafting through the Grand Canyon, I've still been able to become excited about the landscape. In the same essay Adams says that landscape can offer us three verities: geography, autobiography and metaphor. He states that geography, the mere recording of the view, cannot hold our attention unless the photographer impresses himself on the picture. I agree with this, but he offers no basis for this conclusion, and offers no suggestion of a use for this information. He never discusses metaphor again.

One has to wonder who the audience for this book is. Photographers have little to learn from it. Photograph viewers get no help in understanding the truth of a photograph, landscape or otherwise. Who else is there?

I guess I was misled by the title. I expected discussions of beauty in photography and what the traditional and present values were. I never got it.

Like Adams' "Why People Photograph" this series of essays is deeply insightful. Beyond Aesthetics as a philosophical discipline it is a deeply moving -trenchant, poetic-analysis and articulation of photography's largely unrecognized "deep structure" or force as an art.