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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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Robert Adams
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: May 8
Photographer
Orange
New Jersey
Robert Hickman Adams
Robert ii Adams
View
Skirts
Views
Urban
Whatever
Bound
Perilously
Stuff
Bounds
Suggestive
Power
Near
Come
Shot
Banality
Good
Pictures
Skirt
Shots
Closeness

More quotes by Robert Adams

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When art is defined by Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, you've got a society that's impoverished.
Robert Adams
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A lake that is noisy cannot reflect anything
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
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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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You are before being and not being, awake and dream take place in time. You have no time.
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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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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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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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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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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We cannot empty the mind by thinking. Only by observation.
Robert Adams
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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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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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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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Invention in photography is so laborious as to be in most instances perverse.
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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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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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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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