Quote

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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Robert Adams
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: May 8
Photographer
Orange
New Jersey
Robert Hickman Adams
Robert ii Adams
Thing
Commitment
Balances
Photography
Flies
Labor
Snakes
Rocks
Enjoyment
Balance
Absurd
View
Investment
Scrambling
Views
Keeps
Rationally
Understand
Otherwise
Risking

More quotes by Robert Adams

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We cannot empty the mind by thinking. Only by observation.
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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The only freedom we've got is not to react to anything, but to turn within and know the truth.
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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.
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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?
Robert Adams
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History does not unfold: it piles up.
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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...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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Let go of the thoughts, let go of the mind, let go of everything. Let go! Drop it! Drop everything. Hold onto nothing.
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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.
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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.
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Within You is the Light of a Thousand Suns. - Within You is Unimaginable Beauty.
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You've always been free. You've always been bright and shining. Everything else is just nonsense.
Robert Adams
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When art is defined by Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, you've got a society that's impoverished.
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Television probably has become the most evocative, widely observed signpost we have.
Robert Adams
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Timothy O'Sullivan was, it seems to me, the greatest of the photographers because he understood nature first as architecture.
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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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
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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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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