Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values

Robert Adams is one of the most respected voices in American photography, known both for his spare, quietly charged landscapes of the American West and for writing that thinks seriously about what photography is for. Beauty in Photography gathers eight essays written between 1976 and 1981 in which Adams makes a sustained case for beauty as a legitimate and necessary category of photographic judgment, at a time when the concept was widely treated in critical circles as naive or politically suspect. His argument is grounded in specific pictures and specific choices rather than abstract theory, drawing on the work of photographers including Timothy O'Sullivan, Dorothea Lange, and his own contemporaries in the New Topographics movement.

Adams writes with the precision and economy that characterize his photographs, and the essays remain among the most frequently cited texts in photography criticism, assigned in graduate programs and referenced in monographs decades after their first publication. This Aperture edition has been continuously in print since 1981.