Top 32 Best Robert Adams Quotes
#1. You can't talk about life without talking about politics. You have to have both. If you're just a political person, you're going to burn out. If you, as an artist, are just focused inward, you're going to eventually be irrelevant.
Robert Adams
#2. The experience of life that you and I have is pretty much a jigsaw puzzle in the box: Day-to-day experiences of disconnected pieces that don't seem to justify the efforts we make each day.
Robert Adams
#3. 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.
Robert Adams
#4. Why is Form beautiful? Because, I think, it helps us confront our worst fear: the suspicion that life may be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning.
Robert Adams
#6. 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.
Robert Adams
#7. Silence is, after all, the context for the deepest appreciation of art: the only important evaluations are finally, personal, interior ones.
Robert Adams
#8. You are the Self, that perfect immutable Self. Nothing else exists. Nothing else ever existed. Nothing else will ever exist. There is only one Self and you are That. Rejoice!
Robert Adams
#9. The only freedom we've got is not to react to anything, but to turn within and know the truth.
Robert Adams
#10. 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.
Robert Adams
#11. The only way you will ever awaken is through silence, not through analyzation of facts. Not by sorting out good and bad, but through simple silence, letting go. Letting go of all thoughts, all the hurts, all the dogmas and concepts. Letting go of these things daily.
Robert Adams
#12. My first show at MoMA in New York was pictures of new developments along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains. They were housing developments that were brutal in many ways, that cared almost not a thing for the human beings inside. They were just designed to make money.
Robert Adams
#13. 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.
Robert Adams
#14. Let go of the thoughts,
let go of the mind,
let go of everything.
Let go!
Drop it!
Drop everything.
Hold onto nothing.
Robert Adams
#15. No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.
Robert Adams
#16. With a camera, one has to love individual cases.
Robert Adams
#17. You are before being and not being, awake and dream take place in time. You have no time.
Robert Adams
#18. We cannot empty the mind by thinking. Only by observation.
Robert Adams
#19. There is only one I actually. That I is Consciousness. When you follow the personal I to the source, it turns into the universal I, which is Consciousness. Begin to catch yourself. begin to realize your divine nature. You do this by keeping quiet. The fastest way to realization is to keep quiet.
Robert Adams
#20. 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.
Robert Adams
#21. Timothy O'Sullivan was, it seems to me, the greatest of the photographers because he understood nature first as architecture.
Robert Adams
#22. How can we hope, after all, to see a tree or rock or clear north sky if we do not adopt a little of their mode of life, a little of their time? 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
Robert Adams
#23. 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.
Robert Adams
#24. Invention in photography is so laborious as to be in most instances perverse.
Robert Adams
#25. 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 in the world they will find pictures. Nobody does. Each photograph that works is a revelation to its supposed creator.
Robert Adams
#26. 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.
Robert Adams
#27. 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.
Robert Adams
#28. Only when you can understand yourself as All Pervading Consciousness can you possibly understand that all the universe is an emanation of your mind. Everything that you see comes out of you.
Robert Adams
#29. You don't have to set aside a time for meditation. You can do it while you're driving your car,while you're at work, while you're playing music. Just be aware of yourself, of who you really are,and realize the rest is a projection of your mind.
Robert Adams
#30. Your own photography is never enough. Every photographer who has lasted has depended on other peoples pictures too - photographs that may be public or private, serious or funny, but that carry with them a reminder of community.
Robert Adams
#31. I thought I was taking pictures of things that I hated. But there was something about these pictures. They were unexpectedly, disconcertingly glorious.
Robert Adams
#32. If natural selection can create creationists it can manage a caterpillar with a face on its arse.
Zane Stumpo
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