Motives are key. Why we do anything affects how we approach it and how well it is carried out. Landscape photographer Robert Adams wrote a series of essays called Why People Photograph, an examination of the motives behind many succesful photographers. He examines what they want to achieve and why.
It’s an insightful book published by the Aperture Foundation around 1994. Adams starts by arguing that everyone — photographers and nonphotographers — seek “to affirm life without lying about it.” He also argues that succesful photographers never work in a vacuum. They are influenced directly or not, by the images that surround them and by the artists who produced those images.
Photographers can be motivated by differing reasons, some of which are deeply personal and not fully understood by others. Sometimes not understood by themselves. That said, the best work is when a photographer has a clear vision of what he wants and why he wants it.
Robert Adams wrote essays on humor, colleagues, writing, teaching, money, all of which are collected in this book. From there, he examined the work of a number of succesful photographers: Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Laura Gilpin, Judith Joy Ross, Susan Meiselas, Michael Schmidt, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Eugene Atget, and a few others. He hopes to summarize why they photograph and what they hoped to accomplish through their work.
Dorothea Lange, one of my favorite photographers of the 20th century, is described insome detail in Robert Adam’s book. Lange knew her job in the 1930s and had a clear passion for it. She was a photographer for the Farm Security Administration, a job which required her to record images of what was happening in the country at that time.
I’m a little annoyed at the occasional criticism that her work is little more than a government publicity stunt. Those were unique and difficult times in history and her work is more than a public relations initiative. Lange probably knew she was the right person for the task at that crucial moment in history when she photographed Migrant Mother.
As I mentioned, motives count for a lot.