Robert Adams Quotes

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

My memory of those places is better than my pictures. That's why I get much more satisfaction out of shooting thematic work that has to do with an idea that I'm searching for, or searching to express.

Photographs can reveal something to us, and they can also conceal things.

What I find most satisfying about photography is the way in which it allows me to document 'reality' while at the same time creating my own version thereof; in other words, the reality I present is a reality based upon what I choose to include in the frame and what I choose to leave out.

Photography is truth.

If you take photos, don't speak, don't write, don't analyze yourself, and don't answer any questions.

I loved to press the shutter, to freeze time, to turn little slices of life into rectangle rife with metaphor.

Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real.

Photography is Art and Art is Photography.

I'm using the grid as formation. I wanted a relationship between the paintings and videos so that way when you are looking at the videos there's a direct relationship to the paintings.

...all along I've had an ambivalent relationship to photography - but as to whether I thought it an art form, or a craft, or a technique, well, I've always been taken with Henry Geldzahler's answer to that question when he said, I thought it was a hobby.

Still photographs often differ from life more by their silence than by the immobility of their subjects. Landscape pictures tend to converge with life, however, on summer nights, when the sounds outside, after we call in children and close garage doors, are small - the whir of moths, the snap of a stick.

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.

I love the medium of photography, for with its unique realism it gives me the power to go beyond conventional ways of seeing and understanding and say, This is real, too.

I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it.

I don't have anything to say in any picture.

Say what you mean. Say what you see. Make a photograph, if you can, for the reader.

I am somebody who creates images, with my perspectives, fascinations and my instincts as a narrator. You have to activate the audience's imagination. If you are just giving them scientific results, they would forget the film in five minutes flat.

Things that are real are given and received in silence.

The fact that few painter-fine-artists used photography in their work made it appealing.

The photograph isolates and perpetuates a moment of time: an important and revealing moment, or an unimportant and meaningless one, depending upon the photographer's understanding of his subject and mastery of his process.

This profession [photography] is deserving of attention and respect equal to that accorded painting, literature, music and architecture.

Why talk about sculpture when I can photograph it?

Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

The contest between form and content is what, is what art is about - it's art history. That's what basically everybody has ever contended with. The problem is uniquely complex in still photography.