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.
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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) ![](/images/rdquo.gif)
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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Landscape photography can offer us, I think, three verities—geography, autobiography, and metaphor.
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Invention in photography is so laborious as to be in most instances perverse.
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With a camera, one has to love individual cases.
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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) ![](/images/rdquo.gif)
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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