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...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

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Robert Adams
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: May 8
Photographer
Orange
New Jersey
Robert Hickman Adams
Robert ii Adams
Find
Remain
Contradictions
Would
Photography
Wholeness
World
Record
Torn
Records
Contradiction
Ought
Faithful
Greatest
Pictures
Start
Photographer
Felt
Appearance

More quotes by Robert Adams

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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
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Television probably has become the most evocative, widely observed signpost we have.
Robert Adams
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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
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Again the important point to remember is that you should keep asking yourself questions. Do not make statements. Ask questions to yourself. The mind hates that.
Robert Adams
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The only freedom we've got is not to react to anything, but to turn within and know the truth.
Robert Adams
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I keep calling it the I-thought. It's a thought. There is no I. This gives you a clue.
Robert Adams
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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
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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
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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).
Robert Adams
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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.
Robert Adams
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I began making pictures because I wanted to record what supports hope: the untranslatable mystery and beauty of the world. Along the way, however, the camera also caught evidence against hope, and I eventually concluded that this, too, belonged in pictures if they were to be truthful and thus useful.
Robert Adams
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There is still time - in the lee, in the quiet, in the extraordinary light.
Robert Adams
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At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands before our camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect--a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known.
Robert Adams
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Invention in photography is so laborious as to be in most instances perverse.
Robert Adams
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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
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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
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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.
Robert Adams
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...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 that vision starts in the more common experience of confusion and pain.
Robert Adams
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. . .art is a discovery of harmony, a vision of disparities reconciled, or shape beneath confusion.
Robert Adams
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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