List of Robert Adams Quotes

When Art Is Defined By Damien Hirst And Jeff Koons, You've Got A Society That's Impoverished.

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.

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.

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.

...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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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).

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.