reading notes

by Robert Adams

ISBN: 0893816035

This book is a collection of essays in which each does its part to explore why people photograph. Adams manages this without coming across as didactic, heavy-handed, or reductionist. In doing so, he has helped to expand the language I have for thinking about and writing about photography.

Adams is not talking about what motivates the average person to take vacation snaps (though some comments can be extrapolated) but what inspires professional photographers — artists — to make pictures. Talking about the motivation of artists is tricky territory. I’m not sure I always agrede with the things Adams said, but I agreed most of the time, and the rest of the time I believed he really believed what he was saying, and that his statements were reflective of his life as a professional photographer and not the artificial stance of a critic.

I enjoyed the organization of the book, which is divided into three main sections: what can help, examples of success, and working conditions. Adams includes many photographs, reproduced well and given room for breath and focus with only one image appearing on a page, even in cases where two images would fit. Along the way he offers some wonderful definitions, such as his explication of sentimentality as bringing more feeling than is warranted.

The what can help section includes humor, teaching, dogs, and money, among others: things that are necessary perhaps to any life, but especially so, Adams argues, in creative ones. The examples of sucess section includes reviews, and extended commentary on the biographies of photographers. The final section on working conditions takes as its focus the American West, as that is a major source of inspiration for and content of Adams’s own work.

Sometimes Adams offers adequate textual explanation for his opinions and other times he offers pronouncements that I just don’t get, and I go back to the photograph again and again, wondering if I will get it. For instance, I can see why Paul Strand’s portrait “Mr. Bennet, Vermont” is sucessful: it is compelling, real, a human thing, and beautiful. But I don’t see why “Church, Vermont” is “among the greatest architectural pictures ever made.” I recognize there is something different about it — it isn’t “just” a picture of a white clapboard church, like the hundreds of others I’ve seen in life and in pictures — but I’m not sure what that difference is.

It would be easy to pull quote after quote from this book, and I can’t entirely resist doing so:

“Art depends on there being affection in its creator’s life, and an artist must find ways, like everyone else, to nourish it. A photographer down on his or her knees picturing a dog has found pleasure enough to make many things possible.” (p.51, “Dogs”)

“Some art is meant, I think, to help us as we rest, as we get ready to go out again.” (p. 101, “Laura Gilpin”)

“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.” (p.179, “Two Landscapes”)

Adams offers the kinds of treats I hope to find in satisfying books: pointers to other places, other works, other books to go investigate that also offer, in and of themselves, something to mentally chew over. When Adams quotes John Szarkowski’s Modern Times, the fourth and final volume on the work of Atget, where Szarkowski is speaking about a photo of a tiny house, I recognize one of these treats:

It seems a picture that anyone, everyone, would have made exactly like this, at this distance and orientation and at this time of day and year; it seems a subject that anyone would have recognized for its perfection and importance, and photographed just like this, with perfect clarity and philosophical distinterest; it seems scarcely a picture, but rather a house, in which we think we might like to live.

I’ll be interested to see how I feel about this book later, say a year from now, having spent the intervening time reading more about photography, and spending time taking my own pictures. My guess is that it will hold up well. I suspect like many others, I’m interested in the same question that Adams would like to see answered in a major biography of Edward Weston — where do the great pictures come from? Recommended.