“In periods of social crisis, photography as art can seem an inhuman escape. It is so often apparently distant from the specific catastrophes in the day’s news. Think of Stieglitz making, during the worst years of the Depression, his coldly beautiful views of New York City from the heights of the Sheraton Hotel — or of Ansel Adams photographing in the Sierras as the worst of World War II was being fought in Europe. In response to juxtapositions like these there are critics who have asked for “concerned photography,” by which they mean photography that deals directly with social ills. Few photographers themselves have, however, supported the use of the adjective “concerned” as a way of distinguishing one artist from another; they know firsthand that all art is the product of concern. They believe as a consequence that it has social utility — it is designed to give us courage. Society is endangered to the extent that any of us loses faith in meaning, in consequence. Art that can convincingly speak through form for significance bears upon the problem of nihilism and is socially constructive. Restated, photography as art does address evil, but it does so broadly as it works to convince us of life’s value; the darkness that art combats is the ultimate one, the conclusion that life is without worth and finally better off ended. Which is to say that art addresses an inner struggle whereas journalism more often reports on the outward consequences of it. Perhaps this is what William Carlos Williams meant when he wrote that “It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there.””
— Robert Adams ”Photographing Evil”, from Beauty in Photography: In Defense of Traditional Values (1981)
