"When you abide in the I you're abiding in the ego. The I is really the ego, the small I. It turns into the Self eventually."
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Quote collection
Robert Adams quotes (page 4 of 6)
103 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"You can't talk about life without talking about politics. You have to have both. If you're just a political person, you're going to burn out. If you, as an artist, are just focused inward, you're going to eventually be irrelevant."
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"The thing that keeps you scrambling over the rocks, risking snakes, and swatting at the flies is the view. It is only your enjoyment of and commitment to what you see, not to what you rationally understand, that balances the otherwise absurd investment of labor."
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"The suburban West is, from a moral perspective, depressing evidence that we have misused our freedom. There is, however, another aspect to the landscape, an unexpected glory. Over the cheap tracts and littered arroyos one sometimes see a light as clean as that recorded by O'Sullivan. Since it owes nothing to our care, it is an assurance; beauty is final."
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"Of all the sacred places on the coast, none is more comforting than where rivers join the sea. By the river's disappearance we are reminded of life's passing, while by the ocean's beauty we accept it, in a hope we cannot explain."
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"I began making pictures because I wanted to record what supports hope: the untranslatable mystery and beauty of the world. Along the way, however, the camera also caught evidence against hope, and I eventually concluded that this, too, belonged in pictures if they were to be truthful and thus useful."
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"A lake that is noisy cannot reflect anything"
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"...combining the concrete and the universal is at the center of what makes art important."
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"Among the most compelling truths in some of the early photographs is their implication of silence."
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"You are before being and not being, awake and dream take place in time. You have no time."
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"History does not unfold: it piles up."
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"Silence is, after all, the context for the deepest appreciation of art: the only important evaluations are finally, personal, interior ones."
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"Timothy O'Sullivan was, it seems to me, the greatest of the photographers because he understood nature first as architecture."
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"Are there grounds now and then for an unironic smile?"
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"What we hope for from the artist is help in discovering the significance of a place. In this sense we would choose in most respects for thirty minutes with Edward Hopper’s painting Sunday Morning to thirty minutes on the street that was his subject; with Hopper’s vision we see more."
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"I thought I was taking pictures of things that I hated. But there was something about these pictures. They were unexpectedly, disconcertingly glorious."
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"Nature photography... that acknowledges what is wrong, is admittedly sometimes hard to bear - it has to encompass our mistakes. Yet in the long run, it is important; in order to endure our age of apocalypse, we have to be reconciled not only to avalanche and hurricane, but to ourselves."
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"Many have asked, pointing incredulously toward a sweep of tract homes and billboards, why picture that? The question sounds simple, but it implies a difficult issue - why open our eyes anywhere but in undamaged places like national parks?"
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"Whatever power there is in the urban pictures is bound to the closeness with which they skirt banality. For a shot to be good — suggestive of more than just what it is — it has to come perilously near being bad, just a view of stuff."
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"Art depends on there being affection in its creator's life and an artist must find ways, like everyone else, to nourish it. A photographer down on his or her knees picturing a dog has found pleasure enough to make many things possible."
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