Robert Adams Quotes

A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.

I try to figure out - intellectually, philosophically, psychologically - what the experience of beauty is.

Art's the biggest vanity: the assumption that one's view of peace or fright or beauty is permanently communicable.

True poetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, and seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences is able, at most, to attain as a final result.

All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence. Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty.

Common observation and a plain understanding is the source of all art.

A work of art is finished, from the point of view of the artist, when feeling and perception have resulted in a spiritual synthesis.

Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.

Behind all forms of beauty there is an infinite unity, and this unity, this intrinsic and eternal beauty, the artist is seeking to discern and to make others discern.

Many persons feel art, some understand it; but few both feel and understand it.

What's so astonishing about not understanding? There are so many things in art, beginning with art itself, that one doesn't understand. A painter doesn't see everything that he has put in his painting.

Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the mad fools !), then photography and art are the same thing.

Art is a creative effort of which the wellsprings lie in the spirit, and which brings us at once the most intimate self of the artist and the secret concurrences which he has perceived in things by means of a vision or intuition all his own, and not to be expressed in ideas and in words-expressible only in the work of art.

Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.

Art is not about understanding, it’s about experience.

Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is a great matter. Art is an organ of human life, transmitting man's reasonable perception into feeling.

The photographer projects himself into everything he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to know it and to feel it better.

Art is both the taking and giving of beauty; the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life.

The video camera dominates art. It's a bore, it makes everything look a bit the same. If you look at things with a pencil and paper in your hand, you are going to see far more.

Art is a way of showing the outside world what your inside world is like.

Art is a form of supremely delicate awareness and atonement — meaning atoneness, the state of being at one with the object.

Understanding is a form of blindness. Good art, I think, can never be understood.

Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.

for what is the gift of the poet and the artist except to see the sights which others cannot see and to hear the sounds that others cannot hear?