Robert Adams Quotes

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.

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

We cannot empty the mind by thinking. Only by observation.

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.

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.

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

History does not unfold: it piles up.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

A lake that is noisy cannot reflect anything

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.

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.

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.

Teachers must, I discovered, have a gift to teach and the compulsion to use it. And faith. Anything less won't carry you through.

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.

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?

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?

Let me remind you again. Do not try to change your thoughts, or to change your life style, or to work on your bad habits, or to try to remove fear, and the rest of it. Rather you lift your vision high, to the highest, by following the I-thought to its source. And one day you will discover something interesting. Your body will appear to melt, to dissolve. The world, the universe will appear to dissolve. Your God will appear to dissolve. Everything you stood up for, everything you have believed in, all of your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions, will dissolve. And you will find yourself as omnipresence, all-pervading consciousness. You will discover that you've always been the ultimate reality, ultimate oneness. You are the 'I' am. You are free.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Baseball's Sad Lexicon

These are the saddest of possible words:
Tinker to Evers to Chance.
Trio of Bear-cubs, fleeter than birds,
Tinker to Evers to Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double --
Words that are weighty with nothing but trouble:
Tinker to Evers to Chance.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Art does not deny that evil is real, but it places evil in a context that implies an affirmation; the structure of the picture, which is a metaphor for the structure of the Creation, suggests that evil is not final.

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!

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

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

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

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.

With a camera, one has to love individual cases.

The only burden you have ever had is your mind.

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.

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.

When you really understand who you are, you will experience unalloyed happiness. Happiness that you only dreamed about, happiness in the Silence, when nothing is happening but you're happy. Always happy, always at peace. All of the Gods that you have been praying to all your life, all of the Buddha's you've taken refuge in, the Krishnas, the Kalmias, the Shivahs, the Christ, Allah, they're all within you. You are that. There is only the one Self and you are That. Ponder this.

The knowledge of this brings you eternally infinite happiness instantly. When you begin to understand who you are, your Divine nature, that you are not the body, you're not the mind, once you understand your Infinite nature, who you really are and there's nothing else, you immediately become instantly happy. For happiness is your very nature. Happiness, the Self are synonymous. Consciousness, Absolute Reality, Pure Awareness, are all synonymous. There is only One. It has many names, but the One pervades all of space and time. And it is the only existence and you are That. There is no other existence. Awaken to this truth. You are the only One that does exist. And you are Consciousness.

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.

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

You never were the body and you will never be a body. You are pure awareness, the absolute reality. As you think about these things you become them. The worst thing you can do is think about troubles and worries. Always think about the heart. Always think about the Self, which is forever. If you think about anything else it is only temporary, it comes and goes. The good things, the bad things of this world, they come and go. Think only of the Self, the heart. This is your reality, beauty, joy. This is being-ness. This is the 'I am that I am'.

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.

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.