Why People Photograph

Robert Adams's second collection of essays, following Beauty in Photography, extends his thinking about what photography demands of both maker and viewer. The fourteen essays here range across subjects including the work of specific photographers, the relationship between photography and landscape, the ethics of looking, and the conditions that allow a photograph to be more than a record. Adams writes from inside the practice rather than from a critical distance, and the book is grounded throughout in his own experience as a working photographer in the American West.

The essays are short and plainspoken, closer in feel to a practitioner's notebook than to academic criticism, and they have remained in steady use in photography programs since their first publication in 1994. Pairs naturally with Beauty in Photography as the second volume in Adams's ongoing body of writing about the medium.