Robert Adams: Beauty in Photography

The eight essays in Beauty in Photography provide a critical appreciation of photography by one of its foremost proponents. The result is a rare book of criticism, alive to the pleasure and mysteries of true exploration.

Format: Paperback / softback
Number of pages: 112
Publication date: 2005-06-15
Measurements: 5.51 x 8.26 x 0.39 inches
ISBN: 9780893813680

For Adams, art is not some timid diversion or self indulgent entertainment, but goes to the heart of who we are as civilized, compassionate human beings. –The Capital Times
Eight eloquent and thought-provoking essays. –Artweek
The sort of collection of essays to which one can return repeatedly. –Camera 35

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).