Quotes by
Robert Adams

No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.

The word beauty is unavoidable … it accounts for my decision to photograph … There appeared a quality, beauty seemed the only appropriate word for it, in certain photographs, and I am compelled to live with the vocabulary of this new sight … through over many years [I] still find it embarrassing to use the word beauty, I fear I will be attacked for it, but I still believe in it.

One does not for long westle a view camera in the wind and heat and cold just to illustrate a philosophy. 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.

Part of the difficulty in trying to be both an artist and a businessperson is this: You make a picture because you have seen something beyond price; then you are to turn and assign to your record of it a cash value. If the selling is not necessarily a contradiction of the truth in the picture, it is so close to being a contradiction—and the truth is always in shades of gray--that you are worn down by the threat.

Your own photography is never enough. Every photographer who has lasted has depended on other peoples pictures too - photographs that may be public or private, serious or funny but that carry with them a reminder of community.

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.

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.

...the only things that distinguish the photographer from everybody else are his pictures: they alone are the basis for our special interest in him. If pictures cannot be understood without knowing details of the artist's private life, then that is a reason for faulting them; major art, by definition, can stand independent of its maker.

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.

I suppose I usually work in units of pictures because I try to reach a diverse audience, and because I know, having lived on the edge of the world, how important books can be. I learned to photograph mostly by studying books, and I try now to keep up through books.

Nothing is so clarifying… as to stand through the opening of an exhibition to which only officials have come. Experiences like that do encourage defiance, however. Why quit when you’re losing?

Both poetry and photography tend toward metaphor.

With a camera, one has to love individual cases.

As all photographers know, one good picture next to another good picture and you have a third something. It may be better, it may be worse, but putting pictures next to each other inevitably influences the nature of both pictures.

By definition art is not propaganda; the goal is not to excite people to action but to help them find a sense of wholeness and thereby a sense of calm. But from that we take courage for a re-engagement with the specifics of life.

Basically, you photograph because you like what you see.

I’ve been so lonely trying to become a photographer. If I’d known that before, I don’t know if I’d have the courage to do it again.

Invention in photography is so laborious as to be in most instances perverse.

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.

Many photographers in fact remind me in temperament of Thomas Hart Benton; in addition to painting, he said, what he liked was to “drink whiskey and talk big.”

Mainly, you photograph because it’s fun. It’s serious too, but that’s the other side of fun.

When photographers get beyond copying the achievements of others, or just repeating their own accidental first successes, they learn that they do not know where in the world they will find pictures. Nobody does.

I try to stay away from that word, art, but I suspect myself of catering to prejudices in which I don’t believe.

The operating principle that seems to work best is to go to the landscape that frightens you the most and take pictures until you’re not scared anymore.

The final strength in really great photographs is that they suggest more than just what they show literally.

There are a lot of surprises in light as it comes and goes. The practice of photography seems to me a little like what they say of war—the moments of precision and speed and tension are contained within numbing expanses of banality.

If I like many photographers, and I do, I account for this by noting a quality they share - animation. They may or may not make a living by photography, but they are alive by it.

..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.

How can we hope, after all, to see a tree or rock or clear north sky if we do not adopt a little of their mode of life, a little of their time? …if the time it takes to cross space is a way by which we define it, then to arrive at a view of space “in no time” is to have denied its reality...

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?

By Interstate 70: a dog skeleton, a vacuum cleaner, TV dinners, a doll, a pie, rolls of carpet....Later, next to the South Platte River: algae, broken concrete, jet contrails, the smell of crude oil.... What I hope to document, though not at the expense of surface detail, is the form that underlies this apparent chaos.

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.

Philosophy can forsake too easily the details of experience… many writers and painters have demonstrated that thinking long about what art is or ought to be ruins the power to write or paint.

The job of the photographer, in my view, is not to catalogue indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope.

Why do most great pictures look uncontrived? Why do photographers bother with the deception, especially since it so often requires the hardest work of all? The answer is, I think, that the deception is necessary if the goal of art is to be reached: only pictures that look as if they had been easily made can convincingly suggest that beauty is commonplace.

Silence is, after all, the context for the deepest appreciation of art: the only important evaluations are finally, personal, interior ones.

What we hope for from the artist is help in discovering the significance of a place. In this sense we would choose in most respects for thirty minutes with Edward Hopper’s painting Sunday Morning to thirty minutes on the street that was his subject; with Hopper’s vision we see more.

Your own photography is never enough. Every photographer who has lasted has depended on other peoples pictures too - photographs that may be public or private, serious or funny but that carry with them a reminder of community.

I tried to keep in mind a phrase from a novel by [Yasunari] Kawabata: “my life, a fragment of a landscape.” The same applied, I thought, to each of us...

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.

Yes, photographs are only convincing if the photographer pays attention to the facts of life, but photographs have to point beyond the facts.

Both poetry and photography tend toward metaphor.

A photographer can describe a better world only by better seeing the world as it is in front of him.

Photographers who can teach us to love even vacant lots will do so out of the same sense of wholeness that inspired the wilderness photographers of the last twenty-five years (the deepest joy possible in wilderness is, most would agree, the mysterious realization of one’s alliance with it). Beauty, Coleridge wrote, is based in “the unity of the manifold, the coalescence of the diverse.” In this large sense, beautiful photographs of contemporary America will lead us out into daily life by giving us a new understanding of and tolerance for what previously seemed only anarchic and threatening.

Landscape photography can offer us, I think, three verities—geography, autobiography, and metaphor. Geography is, if taken alone, sometimes boring, autobiography is frequently trivial, and metaphor can be dubious. But taken together... the three kinds of representation strengthen each other and reinforce what we all work to keep intact—an affection for life

Photographers are open to gifts. As the poet John Clare wrote, “I found the poems in the fields / And only wrote them down.”

Pictures should look like they were easily taken.

For a shot to be good—suggestive of more than just what it is—it has to come perilously near to being bad, just a view of stuff. (1970)

Photography is new, I submit, because it is among the few arts that have, through the twentieth century, remained attentive to the facts of this world, to the actual appearance of the place that troubles us.

As I understand my job, it is, while suggesting order, to make things appear as much as possible to be the way they are in normal vision.

Lewis Hine said he hoped to show what was wrong so that we would try to change it, and what was right so we could take comfort in it. I don’t often achieve that, but the two goals seem appropriate to me.

..talking about pictures as though you could tell anybody how to take good ones is nuts. Pictures are given, not taken.

It is not legitimate to dislike Marianne Moore’s poetry because she wore crazy clothes or William Faulkner’s novels because he drank too much, and it is not particularly germane to attack a photograph because the person who made it worked for Life magazine or a university, was or was not a socialist, did or did not like Minor White, and so on.

Over and over again the photographer walks a few steps and peers, rather comically, into the camera; to the exasperation of family and friends, he inventories what seems an endless number of angles; he explains, if asked, that he is trying for effective composition, but hesitates to define it. What he means is that a photographer wants form, an unarguably right relationship of shapes, a visual stability in which all components are equally important. The photographer hopes, in brief, to discover a tension so exact that it is peace.

If, as a personal matter, I have chosen not to make color pictures, it is because I have remembered how hard it is to write good free verse, with which color photography has some similarities, both being close to what occurs naturally.

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?

If as individuals we can improve the geography only slightly, if at all, perhaps the more appropriately scaled subject for reshaping is ourselves.