Robert Adams’ Beauty in Photography is an ‘attempt to define (beauty) as it applies to photography.’ Adams’ deconstructs this concept by examining the essence of beauty.
He acknowledges that he used to be of the belief that beauty was an obsolete word; since then he appreciates how ‘beauty is in practice unavoidable.’ Adams’ acknowledges that he used to believe that beauty was an obsolete word, conceivably because of his lack of enlightenment on the subject. His foregoing opinion was formed upon an aesthetics class in school; since then he has discovered that ‘There appeared a quality – Beauty seemed the only appropriate word for it – in certain photographs and paintings that opened my eyes.’ In order to further understand beauty, Adams’ uses the words ‘beauty’ and ‘form’ interchangeably, he then relates this to famous artist works’, such as Shakespeare and Edward Weston.
Adams’ struggles to face that beauty is related to the subject. He questioned whether Capa’s photograph of a Spanish Royalist is beautiful, stating that the image is a ‘distortion’ as its pleasing composition would make the image beautiful if the 1936 image did not capture the death of a soldier. He highlights that ‘Beauty is, at least in part, always tied to subject matter.’
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