Robert Adams Quotes & Sayings

History does not unfold: it piles up. — Robert Adams

When you stop searching and you calm down and you put your books away, and you confront yourself and see what you are all about, that will bring about bliss faster than anything you can ever imagine or ever do. — Robert Adams

The secret to peace-of-mind is to not identify with anything other than your true self. — Robert Adams

There is only one I actually. That I is Consciousness. When you follow the personal I to the source, it turns into the universal I, which is Consciousness. Begin to catch yourself. begin to realize your divine nature. You do this by keeping quiet. The fastest way to realization is to keep quiet. — Robert Adams

No one, though has to go to college to make or understand or enjoy art. Wonderful artists and critics - some of the best - have educated themselves. — Robert Adams

I would welcome the passing of the idea of philosophy as defined by a method of conceptual analysis. But that is not the passing of philosophy, and it leaves the philosopher with the task of grasping natures or essences (among other things). — Robert Adams

We cannot empty the mind by thinking. Only by observation. — Robert Adams

C.S. Lewis admitted, when he was asked to set forth his beliefs, that he never felt less sure of them than when he tried to speak of them. Photographers know this frailty. To them words are a pallid, diffuse way of describing and celebrating what matters. Their gift is to see what will be affecting as a print. Mute. — Robert Adams

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. — Robert Adams

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. — Robert Adams

Our universe is a sea of energy - free, clean energy. It is all out there waiting for us to set sail upon it. — Robert Adams

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? — Robert Adams

Happiness is your True Nature.
Within you is Unimaginable Beauty.
Your True Self is Bright and Shining this Moment.
Through the clear Realization of the Truth,
your Real Self will come shining through. — Robert Adams

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. — Robert Adams

Silence is, after all, the context for the deepest appreciation of art: the only important evaluations are finally, personal, interior ones. — Robert Adams

Are there grounds now and then for an unironic smile? — Robert Adams

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. — Robert Adams

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. — Robert Adams

I keep calling it the I-thought. It's a thought. There is no I. This gives you a clue. — Robert Adams

Almost all photographers have incurred large expenses in the pursuit of tiny audiences, finding that the wonder they'd hoped to share is something few want to receive. — Robert Adams

I thought I was taking pictures of things that I hated. But there was something about these pictures. They were unexpectedly, disconcertingly glorious. — Robert Adams

You look at the movie and you see all kinds of dastardly things going on. But then you catch yourself and you say, "It's only a movie! It's not the truth." And so it is with life. You observe everything that's going on in life, you watch, you look, you see. Yet you never react. You're never for or against. You understand, and this makes you free. — Robert Adams

Part of the reason that these attempts at explanation fail, I think, is that photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them the most fully truthful expression of their vision ... as Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, 'You want me to say it worse?' — Robert Adams

Art does not in fact prove anything. What it does do is record one of those brief times, such as we each have and then each forget, when we are allowed to understand that the Creation is whole. — Robert Adams

There is still time - in the lee, in the quiet, in the extraordinary light. — Robert Adams

Never try to stop the thoughts.
If you try to stop the thoughts they will become bigger and greater and they will win. Because the mind appears to be very powerful.
Yet in reality the mind does not exist.
There is no mind.
There is no such thing as a mind.
So when you sit in the silence you observe, you watch, you become the witness. — Robert Adams

There is always a subjective aspect in landscape art, something in the picture that tells us as much about who is behind the camera as about what is in front of it. — Robert Adams

The only burden you have ever had is your mind. — Robert Adams

You are what you've been looking for. The answer is always in you alone. There is nothing in the external world. For the external world is an emanation of your own mind, your own thinking and your own imagination. You created this world. — Robert Adams

The job of the photographer, in my view, is not to catalogue indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope. This is not to say that he is unconcerned with the truth. — Robert Adams

When you catch on to your awakening, the world does not change. You just see it differently, that's all. You acquire a feeling of immortality. A feeling of divine bliss, so to speak, when things no longer have the power to affect you. — Robert Adams

The only way you will ever awaken is through silence, not through analyzation of facts. Not by sorting out good and bad, but through simple silence, letting go. Letting go of all thoughts, all the hurts, all the dogmas and concepts. Letting go of these things daily. — Robert Adams

Again the important point to remember is that you should keep asking yourself questions. Do not make statements. Ask questions to yourself. The mind hates that. — Robert Adams

Television probably has become the most evocative, widely observed signpost we have. — Robert Adams

Well, you know, the mind is nothing. The mind is only a bunch of thoughts. Thoughts about the past and the future, that is all a mind is. But, the Heart is a center of stillness, of quietness, of Absolute Peace. When you rest your mind in your heart, you feel a joy and a bliss that overwhelms you, and you will Know. Surrender your mind to your Heart, and you will feel it. — Robert Adams

It's in the silence that your problems just dissolve. Try it. It really works. — Robert Adams

Within You is the Light of a Thousand Suns. - Within You is Unimaginable Beauty. — Robert Adams

I felt that photography ought to start with and remain faithful to the appearance of the world, and in so doing record contradictions. The greatest pictures would then ... find wholeness in the torn world. — Robert Adams

Larry Schwarm's photographs of fire on the prairie are so compelling that I cannot imagine any later photographer trying to do better. His pictures convince us that seemingly far away events are close by, relevant to any serious person's life. — Robert Adams

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. — Robert Adams

Assume that art begins in unhappiness. True, the goal of art is to convey a vision of coherence and peace, but the effort to develop that vision starts in the more common experience of confusion and pain. — Robert Adams

Landscape pictures can offer us, I think, three verities: geography, autobiography, and metaphor. Geography is, if taken alone, sometimes boring, autobiography is frequently trivial, and metaphor can be dubious. But taken together, as in the best work of people like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, the three kinds of information strengthen each other and reinforce what we all work to keep intact - the affection for life. — Robert Adams

In a foreign country it is far from easy to study a scene at length when you know that at any minute someone may appear and ask what you are doing and that you can't answer, and you haven't many references, and you don't know the law. Neither is it easy to find and know the subjects for portraits or comfortable to make such picture when you cannot apply an anesthesia of small talk. — Robert Adams

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 — Robert Adams

No matter how many times I tell you this, you're still thinking, thinking, judging, judging, coming to conclusions, trying to work out your life. You have to let go. Totally, absolutely, completely. You have to let go so completely that you will feel no body, no mind, no pain, nothing. — Robert Adams

Why do most great pictures look uncontrived? Why do photographers bother with the deception, especially since it so often requires the hardest work of all? The answer is, I think, that the deception is necessary if the goal of art is to be reached: only pictures that look as if they had been easily made can convincingly suggest that beauty is commonplace. — Robert Adams

The experience of life that you and I have is pretty much a jigsaw puzzle in the box: Day-to-day experiences of disconnected pieces that don't seem to justify the efforts we make each day. — Robert Adams

Art is a discovery of harmony, a vision of disparities reconciled, or shape beneath confusion. — Robert Adams

The only things that distinguish the photographer from everybody else are his pictures: they alone are the basis for our special interest in him. If pictures cannot be understood without knowing details of the artist's private life, then that is a reason for faulting them; major art, by definition, can stand independent of its maker. — Robert Adams

When art is defined by Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, you've got a society that's impoverished. — Robert Adams

Deep down in your heart know that all is well. Understand that the Universe is your friend and can never hurt you. It is the substratum of all existence which is love! When you develop a loving consciousness there can be no problems.
Love takes care of everything. Love is the same as absolute awareness, pure intelligence, or the power of God. When you have enough love inside, there are truly no problems. Problems only arise when you believe you are separate and lacking love. — Robert Adams

If I like many photographers, and I do, I account for this by noting a quality they share - animation. They may or may not make a living by photography, but they are alive by it. — Robert Adams

Still photographs often differ from life more by their silence than by the immobility of their subjects. Landscape pictures tend to converge with life, however, on summer nights, when the sounds outside, after we call in children and close garage doors, are small - the whir of moths, the snap of a stick. — Robert Adams

Do not allow your thoughts to become greater than you. No matter what your thoughts tell you, don't listen. Remember your thoughts are not your friend. Your thoughts try to confound you, confuse you. And they will tell you all kinds of things. Do not listen to your thoughts, even your good thoughts. Transcend everything, go beyond your thoughts to your bliss, to your joy and to your happiness. — Robert Adams

I've been so lonely trying to become a photographer. If I'd known that before, I don't know if I had the courage to do it again. You get to a point where you feel that you have something that is your own. And if you don't find an audience for it, you are going to burst. — Robert Adams

We rely, I think, on landscape photography to make intelligible to us what we already know. — Robert Adams

The only freedom we've got is not to react to anything, but to turn within and know the truth. — Robert Adams

You don't have to set aside a time for meditation. You can do it while you're driving your car,while you're at work, while you're playing music. Just be aware of yourself, of who you really are,and realize the rest is a projection of your mind. — Robert Adams

At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands before our camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect
a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known. — Robert Adams

The history of art is filled with people who did not live long enough to enjoy a sympathetic public, and their misery argues that criticism should try to speed justice. — Robert Adams

For most people to be happy, there has to be a person, place, or thing involved in their happiness. In true happiness, there are no things involved. It's a natural state. You will abide in that state forever. — Robert Adams

All these years you've been searching and looking and trying to change things, trying to add thing onto yourself, trying to acquire things when you have been the source of everything to begin with. Everything you've been looking for has been within yourself you have been that. You then begin to surrender everything to yourself. You surrender all of your thoughts, all of your feelings, you surrender all of your desires, all of your wants to the Self. You pull it in all inwardly. — Robert Adams

The photographer hopes, in brief, to discover a tension so exact that it is peace. — Robert Adams

Do not look for signs.
Do not look for experiences.
Do not be so complicated.
Become like a child.
See everything with awe. — Robert Adams

Timothy O'Sullivan was, it seems to me, the greatest of the photographers because he understood nature first as architecture. — Robert Adams

Why is Form beautiful? Because, I think, it helps us confront our worst fear: the suspicion that life may be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning. — Robert Adams

The highest truth is to delete, not to add. To get rid of the things you believe in now. So empty yourself out totally and completely. All of your ideas, your feelings, all have to be emptied out of you. When you become totally and completely empty there is nothing you have to do to fill it up again. Emptiness is realization. Emptiness is Brahman. Emptiness is the Self. Emptiness is your real nature. — Robert Adams

Little wonder that we ... find the old pictures of openness - pictures usually without any blur, and made by what seems a ritual of patience - wonderful. They restore to us knowledge of a place we seek but lose in the rush of our search. Though to enjoy even the pictures, much less the space itself, requires that we be still longer than is our custom. — Robert Adams

There is only one decision you need to make: You are either working at your Freedom or you are accepting your bondage. — Robert Adams

I want to let you in on a little secret. There are no problems. There are no problems. There never were any problems, there are no problems today, and there will never be any problems. Problems just mean that the world isn't turning the way you want it to. But in truth, there are no problems. Everything is unfolding as it should. Everything is right. You have to forget about yourself and expand your consciousness until you become the whole universe. The Reality in back of the universe is Pure Awareness. It has no problems. And you are That. — Robert Adams

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. — Robert Adams

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. — Robert Adams

When photographers get beyond copying the achievements of others, or just repeating their own accidental first successes, they learn that they do not know where in the world they will find pictures. Nobody does. Each photograph that works is a revelation to its supposed creator. — Robert Adams

Invention in photography is so laborious as to be in most instances perverse. — Robert Adams

Never pray to God for release of your problems. Never pray to God to change your life, and to give you something better. This is wrong prayer. If you have to pray to God, pray to God to give you the strength and the wisdom and the courage that you need to be able to handle the situation that you're in. This is correct prayer. — Robert Adams

Your own photography is never enough. Every photographer who has lasted has depended on other peoples pictures too - photographs that may be public or private, serious or funny, but that carry with them a reminder of community. — Robert Adams

There's something within you that knows what to do. There is a power greater than you that knows how to take care of you without your help. All you've got to do is to surrender to it. Surrender your thoughts, your mind, your ego, to the current that knows the way. It will take care of you. It will take better care of you than you can ever imagine. — Robert Adams

A lake that is noisy cannot reflect anything — Robert Adams

Darkroom work had, after all, never interested me except as a means to an end; the place I wanted to be was outside in the light. — Robert Adams

Part of the difficulty in trying to be both an artist and a businessperson is this: You make a picture because you have seen something beyond price; then you are to turn and assign to your record of it a cash value. If the selling is not necessarily a contradiction of the truth in the picture, it is so close to being a contradiction - and the truth is always in shades of gray-that you are worn down by the threat. — Robert Adams

You are before being and not being, awake and dream take place in time. You have no time. — Robert Adams

Only when you can understand yourself as All Pervading Consciousness can you possibly understand that all the universe is an emanation of your mind. Everything that you see comes out of you. — Robert Adams

My first show at MoMA in New York was pictures of new developments along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains. They were housing developments that were brutal in many ways, that cared almost not a thing for the human beings inside. They were just designed to make money. — Robert Adams

The word beauty is unavoidable ... it accounts for my decision to photograph ... There appeared a quality, beauty seemed the only appropriate word for it, in certain photographs, and I am compelled to live with the vocabulary of this new sight ... through over many years [I] still find it embarrassing to use the word beauty, I fear I will be attacked for it, but I still believe in it. — Robert Adams

With a camera, one has to love individual cases. — Robert Adams

Henry James proposed asking of art three modest and appropriate questions: What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing? — Robert Adams

All land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty. — Robert Adams

Among the most compelling truths in some of the early photographs is their implication of silence. — Robert Adams

You are the Self, that perfect immutable Self. Nothing else exists. Nothing else ever existed. Nothing else will ever exist. There is only one Self and you are That. Rejoice! — Robert Adams

Let go of the thoughts,
let go of the mind,
let go of everything.
Let go!
Drop it!
Drop everything.
Hold onto nothing. — Robert Adams

Combining the concrete and the universal is at the center of what makes art important. — Robert Adams

Beauty, which I admit to being in pursuit of, is an extremely suspect word among many in the art world. But I don't think you can get along without it. It's the confirmation of meaning in life. — Robert Adams

No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film. — Robert Adams

Always remember deep in your heart that all is well and everything is unfolding as it should. There are no mistakes anywhere, at any time. What appears to be wrong is simply your own false imagination. That's all. — Robert Adams

Change no one. Change nothing. React to no one, react to nothing. Do not live in the past and do not, worry about the future. Stay in the eternal now, where all is well. After all you are me and I am you. There's no difference. Do not react to the world. Do not even react to your own body. Do not even react to your own thoughts. Learn to become the witness. Learn to be quiet. — Robert Adams

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. — Robert Adams

Philosophy can forsake too easily the details of experience ... many writers and painters have demonstrated that thinking long about what art is or ought to be ruins the power to write or paint. — Robert Adams

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. — Robert Adams