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We cannot empty the mind by thinking. Only by observation.

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
Observation
Empty
Cannot
Mind
Thinking

More quotes by 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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. . .art is a discovery of harmony, a vision of disparities reconciled, or shape beneath confusion.
Robert Adams
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Do not look for signs. Do not look for experiences. Do not be so complicated. Become like a child. See everything with awe.
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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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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Within You is the Light of a Thousand Suns. - Within You is Unimaginable Beauty.
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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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
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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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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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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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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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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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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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A lake that is noisy cannot reflect anything
Robert Adams
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The photographer hopes, in brief, to discover a tension so exact that it is peace.
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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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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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