Robert Adams: Why People Photograph

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.

Format: Paperback / softback
Number of pages: 189
Publication date: 2005-06-15
Measurements: 5.53 x 8.28 x 0.64 inches
ISBN: 9780893816032

"With the publication of Beauty in Photography and Why People Photograph Robert Adams established himself as one of the most important and eloquent writers on photography.”—Sarah Greenough, National Gallery of Art

"Beyond his fabled skill as a photographer, Adams is an excellent writer. [Why People Photograph] is a book I would recommend to anyone taken with the art of photography."—Charles Desmarais, San Francisco Chronicle    

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).