In the 1970s, Robert Adams wrote various essays that were collected under the title Beauty In Photography. These writings look at the subject from various perspectives, and address a set of themes that includes “Truth and Landscape,” “Beauty in Photography,” and “Making Art New,” among others.

For Adams—a practicing photographer—photography is art, because photographs, just like painting and sculpture, function in the domains of structure and form, composition, gradations of color and hue (he photographs only in black and white), and present the photographer’s view, his emotional response to, and thoughts about, the subject matter. Is this not what all visual art does? All media present the artist’s ideas about something of meaning to the artist.