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It’s Monday!
Hello, Curse and Coffee friends,
Today, we explore Robert Adams and his warnings about photography.
Hit reply and let us know what you think (we read all of your kind words).
Coffee at the ready…
The Big Sip
The take: Photographers spent 50 years ignoring Robert Adams' warning about spectacle, and now AI is making them listen.
What happened: The Phoblographer published an essay Saturday revisiting Adams' 1981 book Beauty in Photography, framing his lessons on slowness and authentic vision as an "antidote" to AI-generated imagery.
Why it matters: Two-thirds of Photoshop beta users now run generative AI daily. Instagram's head just declared the polished feed "dead." Adams' 50-year-old advice, ask "why" before "how," suddenly sounds less like philosophy and more like a survival strategy.
What to watch: Adobe's Project Moonlight, a cross-app AI assistant currently in private beta. If it ships, photographers who can't articulate why they shoot will be competing with software that doesn't need to ask.
Adams, 88, was an English professor who picked up a camera at 26. Never a gear head. His Paris exhibition closed last month, and suddenly, the guy who photographed tract housing and strip malls is having a moment. Fifty years of "dull and flat" are finally paying off.
Sponsor Break
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Here’s Your Brew
Adams made his name in 1975 with the New Topographics exhibition. Photographs of suburban sprawl, tract houses, garbage-strewn roadsides.
Visitors called the work "dull and flat." Fifty years later, it's cited as one of the most influential photography shows ever mounted.
He wrote Beauty in Photography when the threat was gear culture. Photographers were chasing lenses instead of asking what mattered to them.
His argument: photography should stem from care about subjects rather than career ambition.
Figure out why first. The how sorts itself out.
Now machines do spectacle better. Generative Fill sits among Photoshop's five most-used features.
Adobe's VP says creatives use AI as "an essential part of their toolkit."
Adams wasn't warning about technology. He was warning about emptiness.
His definition of beauty rejects spectacle in favour of truth. And truth is the one thing AI can't generate at scale.
Two Sides, One Mug
Pro: Adams' philosophy predates AI panic by decades. The question, why do you photograph, doesn't expire because the tools have changed.
Con: Easy to romanticise slowness at 88 with a MacArthur Fellowship and a retrospective. Working photographers don't get paid for contemplation.
Our read: Adams is useful because he gives people permission to stop racing the machines. But "useful" and "practical" aren't the same thing if you've got client deadlines.
Receipt of the Day
Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defence of Traditional Values — Robert Adams, Aperture (1981, reissued 2023)
A philosophy of photography that "has nothing at all to do with making beautiful photographs." Eight essays across 112 pages. No mention of algorithms, obviously. Aperture reissued it in 2023, which looks prescient now.
Spit Take
Ten photographers. One 1975 exhibition. Now the second-most-cited photo show in history. — George Eastman Museum
Your Coffee Break Links (and water cooler chatter)
Engadget: Mosseri says "rawness," showing up "unflattering," may become the new credibility signal. Imperfection as proof of humanity.
Smarthistory: The original New Topographics exhibition explained. Turns out "boring" was the point.
Art21: Adams on the creative process: "By looking closely at specifics in life, you discover a wider view."
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