Robert Adams Quotes

My only interest in photographing is photography.

If I knew how to take a good photograph, I'd do it every time.

I enjoy photographing. It's always interesting, so I can't say one thing is more fun than another. Everything has it's own difficulties.

I've learned to create a palette, a vocabulary of ways to take pictures.

I just love photographing things and putting them together to tell a story.

It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium.

A good print is really essential. I want to take strong documentary photographs that are as good technically as any of the best technical photographs, and as creative as any of the best fine-art photographs. [...] I don't want to just be a photo essayist; I'm more interested in single images...ones that I feel are good enough to stand on their own.

Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.

A person cannot learn to be a photographer. He can only cultivate what he already has. I try to make people aware that they have something very precious to cultivate.

There are an awful lot of people in the world and it's going to be terribly hard to photograph all of them... It was my teacher Lisette Model who finally made it clear to me that the more specific you are, the more general it will be.

It's the easiest thing in the world to do that, to make successful photographs. It's a bore.

I love painting. As far as photography is concerned, I understand nothing.

Photographers want to reinvent you, to take you somewhere else, to show you in a completely different way. They look at your previous work, and try to figure out what they can do to show a new side of you.

If you see a theme that you might want to take a photo of, you sort of stand there for an hour waiting for it to resolve, waiting for the geometry of a theme to be exactly what you want them to be. That was my process to get photos.

Many photographers are consumed with the idea of making beautiful contact sheets. I am far more interested in making the best final print I can.

Photography is not a sport. It has no rules. Everything must be dared and tried!

Photography is the easiest thing to make, and one of the hardest things to make well.

Photographier: c'est mettre sur la meme ligne de mire la tete, l'oeil et le coeur.

It's very easy to make successful photographs - it's very easy.

I'm actually not so sure what I'm hoping to find making photographs. You always want to come back with an image that's interesting visually, and you hope to get something from the person you photograph that's different than other images you know of these people. I don't know how I go about it. I also don't know how exactly what I set out to get other than these two things.

Photography has saturated us as spectators from its inception amidst a mingling of laboratorial pursuits and magic acts to its current status as propagator of convention, cultural commodity, and global hobby.

I'm a moviemaker, not a documentarian. I try to hit the truth.

A camera gives you a purpose.

I admire photographers who can take much more ordinarily subject matter and make it transcend that ordinariness, so that it becomes something else fresh and new. It opens this doorway. I really admire people who can do that with photography.

The precision of hisskill places his work beyond the tentative and the experimental stage. He is continually searching and exploring both himself and his surroundings. and in this exploration of the realm of places, people and things, contrasts and relationships, Callahan is no respecter of conventional technical formula or code. His delicate sense of pattern is an integral part of his photography and not a thing by itself.