Robert Adams Quotes

I love scenes with minimal dialogue.

The camera can be the most deadly weapon since the assassin's bullet. Or it can be the lotion of the heart.

If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug around a camera.

For me, the perfect film has no dialogue at all. It's purely a visual, emotional, visceral kind of experience. And I think one can create wonderful depth and meaning and communication without using words. I started out as an illustrator and a cartoonist and caricature artist, so for me the visual is primary.

The camera can capture thought in a way that's quite surprising and shocking. You can become very simple and minimal in your work and communicate a lot with just a finger or an eyebrow, or a look, or a glance.

It's hard to explain your emotions when you see a work of art.

The less lines, the better. I am the silent film actor, but not in a slapstick sort of way. Film is an image-based medium, so whatever you can say without the words is far more provocative and punctuating. If the lines are not funny or if they don't advance the story, sometimes it's hard. I hate talk in movies.

The reason I do photographs is to help people understand my music, so it's very important that I am the same, emotionally, in the photographs as in the music. Most people's eyes are much better developed than their ears. If they see a certain emotion in the photograph, then they'll understand the music.

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.

I'm much more about the emotion that a photograph provokes out of you and less about how technically brilliant it is.

Different people get different things out of the images. It doesn't matter what it's about, all that matters is how it makes you feel.

If the picture speaks to me, if it tells me something about myself, then I want it. Then I have to have it.

In Hitchcock's eyes the movement was dramatic, not the acting. When he wanted the audience to be moved, he moved the camera. He was a subtle human being, and he was also the best director I have ever worked with.

A painting of a person can be descriptive, but for me it's about all the things that make up a picture - the feelings, the brushstrokes - more than describing somebody. People latch on to the personalities when they talk about my work and forget the other parts.

When you're used to looking through a stills lens and you have to capture an emotional moment, and that picture is not moving and yet it has to have impact, I think that's the first influence on my style.

Every photograph is the photographer's opinion about something. It's how they feel about something: what they think is horrible, tragic, funny.

As I started to develop as a director, I wanted to do projects that were inherently more cinematic, where the freight was not so much in the dialogue, where it would be carried more by the camera.

Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.

Not all paintings are abstract; they're not all Jackson Pollock. There's value in a photograph of a man alone on a boat at sea, and there is value in painting of a man alone on a boat at sea. In the painting, the painting has more freedom to express an idea, more latitude in being able to elicit certain emotion.

I think all art - if it's good - is a result of really trying to create something that you can't put into words. Where language ends is where good art begins.

I find movies rely upon dialogue too much sometimes, and you lose the power of what really the most basic cinematic language is, which is the visual language.

For 'City of Ghosts,' I really didn't speak any Arabic. It obviously made it more difficult, but I also found it to be an advantage while shooting. It allowed me to focus on the emotion of the scene as opposed to just chasing dialogue.

I can tell you what I personally use a camera for. Basically, it is to record a moment. A moment that is vital to give the viewer a sensation of liveliness, sadness, joy and so on.

I'm really taken by the fact that my photographs live on somebody's wall.

Cinema is a visual medium one has to communicate through visuals, and therefore, dialogues should be less.