Robert Adams Quotes About Photography

Quotes about: Photography

• 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

  Photography, Community, May

  Robert Adams (1994). “Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews”

• No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.

  Robert Adams

  Inspirational, Good Night, Photography

  Robert Adams, Richard B. Woodward (2006). “Along some rivers: photographs and conversations”

• 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?'

  Robert Adams

  Photography, Thinking, Artist

  Robert Adams (1994). “Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews”

• 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

  Photography, Commitment, Rocks

• There is still time - in the lee, in the quiet, in the extraordinary light.

  Robert Adams

  Photography, Light, Quiet

  Robert Adams (1994). “Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews”

• 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

  Photography, Achievement, World

  Robert Adams (1994). “Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews”

• 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.

  Robert Adams

  Photography, Quality, Alive

  Robert Adams (1994). “Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews”

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

  Robert Adams

  Photography, Silence, Compelling

  Robert Adams (1994). “Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews”

• 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.

  Robert Adams

  Photography, Space, Littles

• ...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

  Photography, Faithful, Records

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

  Robert Adams

  Photography, Firsts, Photographer

  Robert Adams (1994). “Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews”

• 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.

  Robert Adams

  Photography, Taken, Thinking

  Robert Adams (1989). “Beauty in photography: essays in defense of traditional values”

• 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

  Photography, Jobs, Views

  Robert Adams (1989). “Beauty in photography: essays in defense of traditional values”

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

  Robert Adams

  Photography, Art, Discovery

• 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.

  Robert Adams

  Photography, Country, Law

  Robert Adams, Maren Stange (1990). “Paul Strand: essays on his life and work”

• Art does not in fact prove anything. What it does do is record one of those brief times, such as we each have and then each forget, when we are allowed to understand that the Creation is whole.

  Robert Adams

  Photography, Art, Doe

  Robert Adams (1994). “Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews”

• ... 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.

  Robert Adams

  Photography, Reality, Space

• 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.

  Robert Adams

  Photography, Art, Landscape

  Robert Adams (1989). “Beauty in photography: essays in defense of traditional values”

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

  Robert Adams

  Photography, Thinking, Landscape

  Robert Adams (1989). “Beauty in photography: essays in defense of traditional values”

• 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

  Photography, Running, Mistake

  Robert Adams (1989). “Beauty in photography: essays in defense of traditional values”

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

  Robert Adams

  Photography, Invention, Instance

  Robert Adams (1989). “Beauty in photography: essays in defense of traditional values”

• I've been so lonely trying to become a photographer. If I'd known that before, I don't know if I had the courage to do it again. You get to a point where you feel that you have something that is your own. And if you don't find an audience for it, you are going to burst.

  Robert Adams

  Photography, Lonely, Trying

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