Robert Adams Quotes

78 quotes in 1266 categories

• No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.
• All these years you've been searching and looking and trying to change things, trying to add thing onto yourself, trying to acquire things when you…
• I would welcome the passing of the idea of philosophy as defined by a method of conceptual analysis. But that is not the passing of…
• Our universe is a sea of energy - free, clean energy. It is all out there waiting for us to set sail upon it.
• If I like many photographers, and I do, I account for this by noting a quality they share - animation. They may or may not…
• There is always a subjective aspect in landscape art, something in the picture that tells us as much about who is behind the camera as…
• When photographers get beyond copying the achievements of others, or just repeating their own accidental first successes, they learn that they do not know where…
• Part of the reason that these attempts at explanation fail, I think, is that photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them…
• ...I felt that photography ought to start with and remain faithful to the appearance of the world, and in so doing record contradictions. The greatest…
• Landscape pictures can offer us, I think, three verities: geography, autobiography, and metaphor. Geography is, if taken alone, sometimes boring, autobiography is frequently trivial, and…
• The job of the photographer, in my view, is not to catalogue indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope. This…
• In a foreign country it is far from easy to study a scene at length when you know that at any minute someone may appear…
• ... If we consider the difference between William Henry Jackson packing in his camera by mule, and the person stepping for a moment from his…
• We rely, I think, on landscape photography to make intelligible to us what we already know.
• ...assume that art begins in unhappiness. True, the goal of art is to convey a vision of coherence and peace, but the effort to develop…
• ...combining the concrete and the universal is at the center of what makes art important.
• No one, though has to go to college to make or understand or enjoy art. Wonderful artists and critics - some of the best -…
• Among the most compelling truths in some of the early photographs is their implication of silence.
• Little wonder that we. . .find the old pictures of openness - pictures usually without any blur, and made by what seems a ritual of…
• Timothy O'Sullivan was, it seems to me, the greatest of the photographers because he understood nature first as architecture.

Browse Robert Adams Quotes by Category