Top 103 Quotes & Sayings by Robert Adams - Page 2

Philosophy can forsake too easily the details of experience… many writers and painters have demonstrated that thinking long about what art is or ought to be ruins the power to write or paint.

Art depends on there being affection in its creator's life and an artist must find ways, like everyone else, to nourish it. A photographer down on his or her knees picturing a dog has found pleasure enough to make many things possible.

...combining the concrete and the universal is at the center of what makes art important.

Of all the sacred places on the coast, none is more comforting than where rivers join the sea. By the river's disappearance we are reminded of life's passing, while by the ocean's beauty we accept it, in a hope we cannot explain.

Little wonder that we. . .find the old pictures of openness - pictures usually without any blur, and made by what seems a ritual of patience - wonderful. They restore to us knowledge of a place we seek but lose in the rush of our search. Though to enjoy even the pictures, much less the space itself, requires that we be still longer than is our custom.

Darkroom work had, after all, never interested me except as a means to an end; the place I wanted to be was outside in the light.

Whatever power there is in the urban pictures is bound to the closeness with which they skirt banality. For a shot to be good — suggestive of more than just what it is — it has to come perilously near being bad, just a view of stuff.

. . .art is a discovery of harmony, a vision of disparities reconciled, or shape beneath confusion.

... If we consider the difference between William Henry Jackson packing in his camera by mule, and the person stepping for a moment from his car to take a picture with his Instamatic, it becomes clear how some of our space has vanished; if the time it takes to cross space is a way by which we define it, then to arrive at a view of space 'in no time' is to have denied its reality.

I have asked students at the beginning of their careers, what things of that sort might haunt them – what things they must photograph, things they have to try to shoot even before they master the intricacies of making dye transfer prints.

Many have asked, pointing incredulously toward a sweep of tract homes and billboards, why picture that? The question sounds simple, but it implies a difficult issue - why open our eyes anywhere but in undamaged places like national parks?

The history of art is filled with people who did not live long enough to enjoy a sympathetic public, and their misery argues that criticism should try to speed justice.

Still photographs often differ from life more by their silence than by the immobility of their subjects. Landscape pictures tend to converge with life, however, on summer nights, when the sounds outside, after we call in children and close garage doors, are small - the whir of moths, the snap of a stick.

With a camera, one has to love individual cases.

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 is not to say that he is unconcerned with the truth.

No one, though has to go to college to make or understand or enjoy art. Wonderful artists and critics - some of the best - have educated themselves.

What we hope for from the artist is help in discovering the significance of a place. In this sense we would choose in most respects for thirty minutes with Edward Hopper’s painting Sunday Morning to thirty minutes on the street that was his subject; with Hopper’s vision we see more.

Timothy O'Sullivan was, it seems to me, the greatest of the photographers because he understood nature first as architecture.

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 and ask what you are doing and that you can't answer, and you haven't many references, and you don't know the law. Neither is it easy to find and know the subjects for portraits or comfortable to make such picture when you cannot apply an anesthesia of small talk.

History does not unfold: it piles up.

Almost all photographers have incurred large expenses in the pursuit of tiny audiences, finding that the wonder they'd hoped to share is something few want to receive.

The photographer hopes, in brief, to discover a tension so exact that it is peace.

We rely, I think, on landscape photography to make intelligible to us what we already know.

Among the most compelling truths in some of the early photographs is their implication of silence.

Invention in photography is so laborious as to be in most instances perverse.

C.S. Lewis admitted, when he was asked to set forth his beliefs, that he never felt less sure of them than when he tried to speak of them. Photographers know this frailty. To them words are a pallid, diffuse way of describing and celebrating what matters. Their gift is to see what will be affecting as a print. Mute.

...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 pictures would then... find wholeness in the torn world.

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 the most fully truthful expression of their vision... as Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, 'You want me to say it worse?'

Silence is, after all, the context for the deepest appreciation of art: the only important evaluations are finally, personal, interior ones.

You are before being and not being, awake and dream take place in time. You have no time.

Why do most great pictures look uncontrived? Why do photographers bother with the deception, especially since it so often requires the hardest work of all? The answer is, I think, that the deception is necessary if the goal of art is to be reached: only pictures that look as if they had been easily made can convincingly suggest that beauty is commonplace.

Henry James proposed asking of art three modest and appropriate questions: What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing?

Beauty, which I admit to being in pursuit of, is an extremely suspect word among many in the art world. But I don't think you can get along without it. It's the confirmation of meaning in life.

Part of the difficulty in trying to be both an artist and a businessperson is this: You make a picture because you have seen something beyond price; then you are to turn and assign to your record of it a cash value. If the selling is not necessarily a contradiction of the truth in the picture, it is so close to being a contradiction—and the truth is always in shades of gray-that you are worn down by the threat.

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 about what is in front of it.

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 philosophy, and it leaves the philosopher with the task of grasping natures or essences (among other things).

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 metaphor can be dubious. But taken together, as in the best work of people like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, the three kinds of information strengthen each other and reinforce what we all work to keep intact - the affection for life.

The suburban West is, from a moral perspective, depressing evidence that we have misused our freedom. There is, however, another aspect to the landscape, an unexpected glory. Over the cheap tracts and littered arroyos one sometimes see a light as clean as that recorded by O'Sullivan. Since it owes nothing to our care, it is an assurance; beauty is final.

The thing that keeps you scrambling over the rocks, risking snakes, and swatting at the flies is the view. It is only your enjoyment of and commitment to what you see, not to what you rationally understand, that balances the otherwise absurd investment of labor.

Nature photography... that acknowledges what is wrong, is admittedly sometimes hard to bear - it has to encompass our mistakes. Yet in the long run, it is important; in order to endure our age of apocalypse, we have to be reconciled not only to avalanche and hurricane, but to ourselves.

Are there grounds now and then for an unironic smile?

Larry Schwarm's photographs of fire on the prairie are so compelling that I cannot imagine any later photographer trying to do better. His pictures convince us that seemingly far away events are close by, relevant to any serious person's life.

If I like many photographers, and I do, I account for this by noting a quality they share - animation. They may or may not make a living by photography, but they are alive by it.