Robert Adams Quotes

The landscape is like being there with a powerful personality and I'm searching for just the right angles to make that portrait come across as meaningfully as possible.

I never photograph sunsets and I never photograph moonrises. I'm not interested in what things look like.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

I paint what I see, not what a camera would see.

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.

What I wish to show when I paint is the way I see things with my eyes and in my heart.

The faces people make when they are photographed and the face they have when you draw them are very different.

I try and take the photographs and paintings and make them real. And the real video we treat as paintings. We flip the reality.

If you look at ancient Chinese paintings, you see mountains, but they are not real mountains; it is something the artists imagined.

Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.

Arguments against photography ever being considered a fine art are: the element of chance which enters in, — finding things ready-made for a machine to record, and of course the mechanics of the medium. I say that chance enters into all branches of art.

Photography is Art and Art is Photography.

My pictures are devoid of objects; like objects, they are themselves objects. This means that they are devoid of content, significance or meaning, like objects or trees, animals, people or days, all of which are there without a reason, without a function and without a purpose. This is the quality that counts. Even so, there are good and bad pictures.

Those trying to explain pictures are as a rule completely mistaken.

Machines have come, art has fled, and I am far from thinking photography can help us.

If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.

Photography is the product of complete alienation.

The true painter strives to paint what can only be seen through his world.

Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar. Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes visible.

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.

The painters have no copyright on modern art!... I believe in, and make no apologies for, photography: it is the most important graphic medium of our day. It does not have to be, indeed cannot be - compared to painting - it has different means and aims.

Photography - the supreme form of travel, of tourism - is the principal modern means for enlarging the world. As a branch of art, photography's enterprise of world enlargement tends to specialize in the subjects felt to be challenging, transgressive. A photograph may be telling us: this too exists. And that. And that. (And it is all 'human.') But what are we to do with this knowledge - if indeed it is knowledge, about, say, the self, about abnormality, about ostracized or clandestine worlds?

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.

The painter makes real to others his innermost feelings about all that he cares for. A secret becomes known to everyone who views the picture through the intensity with which it is felt.