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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
Are there grounds now and then for an unironic smile?
Robert Adams
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
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
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
The only freedom we've got is not to react to anything, but to turn within and know the truth.
Robert Adams
I keep calling it the I-thought. It's a thought. There is no I. This gives you a clue.
Robert Adams
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
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
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
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
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
All land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty.
Robert Adams
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
When you catch on to your awakening, the world does not change. You just see it differently, that's all. You acquire a feeling of immortality. A feeling of divine bliss, so to speak, when things no longer have the power to affect you.
Robert Adams
When art is defined by Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, you've got a society that's impoverished.
Robert Adams
Invention in photography is so laborious as to be in most instances perverse.
Robert Adams
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
Only when you can understand yourself as All Pervading Consciousness can you possibly understand that all the universe is an emanation of your mind. Everything that you see comes out of you.
Robert Adams
...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
There's something within you that knows what to do. There is a power greater than you that knows how to take care of you without your help. All you've got to do is to surrender to it. Surrender your thoughts, your mind, your ego, to the current that knows the way. It will take care of you. It will take better care of you than you can ever imagine.
Robert Adams