Quote

...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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Robert Adams
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: May 8
Photographer
Orange
New Jersey
Robert Hickman Adams
Robert ii Adams
Common
Confusion
Peace
Starts
Pain
Assuming
Experience
Begins
Art
Develop
Coherence
True
Vision
Convey
Effort
Unhappiness
Goal
Assume

More quotes by Robert Adams

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Always remember deep in your heart that all is well and everything is unfolding as it should. There are no mistakes anywhere, at any time. What appears to be wrong is simply your own false imagination. That's all.
Robert Adams
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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.
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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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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. . .art is a discovery of harmony, a vision of disparities reconciled, or shape beneath confusion.
Robert Adams
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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
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We have names for everything. What if we forgot about those names? And we stopped seeing things as something? What if we just observed things, watched things, without giving them a name, without coming to a conclusion? What do you think would happen? You would transcend everything.
Robert Adams
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When you abide in the I you're abiding in the ego. The I is really the ego, the small I. It turns into the Self eventually.
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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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?
Robert Adams
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History does not unfold: it piles up.
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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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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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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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
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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
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Within You is the Light of a Thousand Suns. - Within You is Unimaginable Beauty.
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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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.
Robert Adams
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Never try to stop the thoughts. If you try to stop the thoughts they will become bigger and greater and they will win. Because the mind appears to be very powerful. Yet in reality the mind does not exist. There is no mind. There is no such thing as a mind. So when you sit in the silence you observe, you watch, you become the witness.
Robert Adams