Robert Adams Quotes

The camera is not only an extension of the eye but of the brain. It can see sharper, farther, nearer, slower, faster than the eye. It can see by invisible light. It can see in the past, present, and future. Instead of using the camera only to reproduce objects, I wanted to use it to make what is invisible to the eye - visible.

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

Camera 1.0 was film. Camera 2.0 was digital. 3.0 is a light-field camera that opens all these new possibilities for your picture taking.

I think technology has advanced so far now that there are some cameras on the market that give film a run for its money. It's all about flexibility in capturing images, and digital or film, it doesn't matter to me.

Nothing puzzles me more than the time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less.

When we assess the impact of technological changes, we tend to downplay things that happened a while ago.

The first half of the 20th century belongs to Picasso, and the second half is about photography. They said digital would kill photography because everyone can do it, but they said that about the box brownie in 1885 when it came out. It makes photography interesting because everyone thinks they can take a picture.

It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.

Every major technological step forward has profoundly changed human society - that's how we know they're major, even if we don't always realise it at the time. Farming created cities. Writing, followed eventually by printing, vastly increased the preservation and transmission of cultural information across time and space.

Even in empty space, time and space still exist.

I feel as though maybe our concept of time and space is very limited. Maybe everything is all happening at once, if you know what I mean.

From analog film cameras to digital cameras to iPhone cameras, it has become progressively easier to take and store photographs. Today, we don't even think twice about snapping a shot.

Now anybody can make music at home, and you can hear music on any computer without having to buy it. Everything is apparently better with all the machines we have now, but at the same time, the quality of life is not improving.

As I pointed out in The Art of the Motor and elsewhere, from now on we need two watches: a wristwatch to tell us what time it is and a GPS watch to tell us what space it is!

We live in a box of space and time. Movies are windows in its walls.

To me, the amazing thing is that so much that was science fiction back then, political fiction, today is reality. We have indeed a spacecraft called an international space station. And we have the diversity of this planet working on that ship, including Americans and Russians working side by side. I think the imagineers are the ones that set the goal. And the inventors and the technicians see that as a goal to work toward, or the political scientists and the diplomats. And eventually, that's arrived at.

In space-time everything which for each of us constitutes the past, the present and the future is given en bloc...Each observer, as his time passes, discovers, so to speak, new slices of space-time which appear to him as successive aspects of the material world, though in reality the ensemble of events constituting space-time exist prior to his knowledge of them.

In 1850, August Salzmann photographed, near Jerusalem, the road to Beith-Lehem (as it was spelled at the time): nothing but stony ground, olive trees; but three tenses dizzy my consciousness: my present, the time of Jesus, and that of the photographer, all this under the instance of 'reality' - and no longer through the elaborations of the text, whether fictional or poetic, which itself is never credible down to the root.

If the Universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don't. It's like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don't hurt it. Not even major surgery if it's done properly. Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make.

Once digital came, I could see my images instantly right there on the camera. I think that makes you a better photographer because you can see right there if your subject's eyes are closed or if you exposed it wrong and if it's too bright or dark. You can fix it right here. With film, you wouldn't know until you got the prints back if something was messed up, and then there was nothing you could do. That was a huge advantage.

Flying has torn apart the relationship of space and time: it uses our old clock but with new yardsticks.

A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true.

Worlds and particles, bodies and beings, time and space: All are transient expressions of the Tao.

A photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how the camera 'saw' a piece of time and space.

I feel all things as dynamic events, being, changing, and interacting with each other in space and time even as I photograph them.