Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]

 …talking about pictures as though you could tell anybody how to take good ones is nuts. Pictures are given, not taken. 
 The operating principle that seems to work best is to go to the landscape that frightens you the most and take pictures until you’re not scared anymore. (1982) 
 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? 
 Landscape photography can offer us, I think, three verities—geography, autobiography, and metaphor. 
 Invention in photography is so laborious as to be in most instances perverse. 
 With a camera, one has to love individual cases. 
 For a shot to be good—suggestive of more than just what it is—it has to come perilously near to being bad, just a view of stuff. (1970) 
 The job of the photographer, in my view, is not to catalogue indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope. 
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