Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Robert Adams, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Robert Adams quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 74 Robert Adams quotes for you to read and share.
Larry Schwarm's photographs of fire on the prairie are so compelling that I cannot imagine any later photographer trying to do better. His pictures convince us that seemingly far away events are close by, relevant to any serious person's life. -- Robert Adams
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. -- Robert Adams
I thought I was taking pictures of things that I hated. But there was something about these pictures. They were unexpectedly, disconcertingly glorious. -- 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
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
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. -- Robert Adams
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 -- Robert Adams
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. -- 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 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
No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film. -- 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
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. Each photograph that works is a revelation to its supposed creator. -- 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
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
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
All land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty. -- Robert Adams
Timothy O'Sullivan was, it seems to me, the greatest of the photographers because he understood nature first as architecture. -- Robert Adams
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
My first show at MoMA in New York was pictures of new developments along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains. They were housing developments that were brutal in many ways, that cared almost not a thing for the human beings inside. They were just designed to make money. -- 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
You can't talk about life without talking about politics. You have to have both. If you're just a political person, you're going to burn out. If you, as an artist, are just focused inward, you're going to eventually be irrelevant. -- Robert Adams
For most people to be happy, there has to be a person, place, or thing involved in their happiness. In true happiness, there are no things involved. It's a natural state. You will abide in that state forever. -- Robert Adams
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
You are what you've been looking for. The answer is always in you alone. There is nothing in the external world. For the external world is an emanation of your own mind, your own thinking and your own imagination. You created this world. -- Robert Adams
Art depends on there being affection in its creator's life and an artist must find ways, like everyone else, to nourish it. A photographer down on his or her knees picturing a dog has found pleasure enough to make many things possible. -- Robert Adams
You are before being and not being, awake and dream take place in time. You have no time. -- Robert Adams
Many have asked, pointing incredulously toward a sweep of tract homes and billboards, why picture that? The question sounds simple, but it implies a difficult issue - why open our eyes anywhere but in undamaged places like national parks? -- Robert Adams
No matter how many times I tell you this, you're still thinking, thinking, judging, judging, coming to conclusions, trying to work out your life. You have to let go. Totally, absolutely, completely. You have to let go so completely that you will feel no body, no mind, no pain, nothing. -- Robert Adams
You don't have to set aside a time for meditation. You can do it while you're driving your car,while you're at work, while you're playing music. Just be aware of yourself, of who you really are,and realize the rest is a projection of your mind. -- Robert Adams
The only burden you have ever had is your mind. -- Robert Adams
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. -- Robert Adams
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
The only way you will ever awaken is through silence, not through analyzation of facts. Not by sorting out good and bad, but through simple silence, letting go. Letting go of all thoughts, all the hurts, all the dogmas and concepts. Letting go of these things daily. -- Robert Adams
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
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
Art is a discovery of harmony, a vision of disparities reconciled, or shape beneath confusion. -- Robert Adams
History does not unfold: it piles up. -- Robert Adams
When you stop searching and you calm down and you put your books away, and you confront yourself and see what you are all about, that will bring about bliss faster than anything you can ever imagine or ever do. -- Robert Adams
There is only one I actually. That I is Consciousness. When you follow the personal I to the source, it turns into the universal I, which is Consciousness. Begin to catch yourself. begin to realize your divine nature. You do this by keeping quiet. The fastest way to realization is to keep quiet. -- Robert Adams
Happiness is your True Nature.
Within you is Unimaginable Beauty.
Your True Self is Bright and Shining this Moment.
Through the clear Realization of the Truth,
your Real Self will come shining through. -- Robert Adams
It's in the silence that your problems just dissolve. Try it. It really works. -- Robert Adams
A lake that is noisy cannot reflect anything -- Robert Adams
Silence is, after all, the context for the deepest appreciation of art: the only important evaluations are finally, personal, interior ones. -- Robert Adams
Art does not in fact prove anything. What it does do is record one of those brief times, such as we each have and then each forget, when we are allowed to understand that the Creation is whole. -- Robert Adams
There is always a subjective aspect in landscape art, something in the picture that tells us as much about who is behind the camera as about what is in front of it. -- Robert Adams
Invention in photography is so laborious as to be in most instances perverse. -- Robert Adams
No one, though has to go to college to make or understand or enjoy art. Wonderful artists and critics - some of the best - have educated themselves. -- Robert Adams
Among the most compelling truths in some of the early photographs is their implication of silence. -- Robert Adams
When art is defined by Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, you've got a society that's impoverished. -- 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
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
The secret to peace-of-mind is to not identify with anything other than your true self. -- 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
Combining the concrete and the universal is at the center of what makes art important. -- Robert Adams
Beauty, which I admit to being in pursuit of, is an extremely suspect word among many in the art world. But I don't think you can get along without it. It's the confirmation of meaning in life. -- Robert Adams
Always remember deep in your heart that all is well and everything is unfolding as it should. There are no mistakes anywhere, at any time. What appears to be wrong is simply your own false imagination. That's all. -- Robert Adams
We rely, I think, on landscape photography to make intelligible to us what we already know. -- Robert Adams
The photographer hopes, in brief, to discover a tension so exact that it is peace. -- Robert Adams
There is only one decision you need to make: You are either working at your Freedom or you are accepting your bondage. -- Robert Adams
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
With a camera, one has to love individual cases. -- Robert Adams
Let go of the thoughts,
let go of the mind,
let go of everything.
Let go!
Drop it!
Drop everything.
Hold onto nothing. -- Robert Adams
You are the Self, that perfect immutable Self. Nothing else exists. Nothing else ever existed. Nothing else will ever exist. There is only one Self and you are That. Rejoice! -- Robert Adams
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
Our universe is a sea of energy - free, clean energy. It is all out there waiting for us to set sail upon it. -- 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
Are there grounds now and then for an unironic smile? -- Robert Adams
We cannot empty the mind by thinking. Only by observation. -- Robert Adams
Within You is the Light of a Thousand Suns. - Within You is Unimaginable Beauty. -- Robert Adams
Television probably has become the most evocative, widely observed signpost we have. -- Robert Adams
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
There is still time - in the lee, in the quiet, in the extraordinary light. -- Robert Adams