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

 By Interstate 70: a dog skeleton, a vacuum cleaner, TV dinners, a doll, a pie, rolls of carpet... Later, next to the South Platte River: algae, broken concrete, jet contrails, the smell of crude oil... What I hope to document, though not at the expense of surface detail, is the form that underlies this apparent chaos. 
 What a landscape photographer traditionally tries to do is show what is past, present, and future at once. You want ghosts and the daily news and prophecy... It’s presumptuous and ridiculous. You fail all the time. 
 One does not for long wrestle a view camera in the wind and heat and cold just to illustrate a philosophy. 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. 
 Both poetry and photography tend toward metaphor. 
 Yes, photographs are only convincing if the photographer pays attention to the facts of life, but photographs have to point beyond the facts. 
 Your own photography is never enough. Every photographer who has lasted has depended on other people’s pictures too—photographs that may be public or private, serious or funny, but that carry with them a reminder of community. 
 Mainly, you photograph because it’s fun. It’s serious too, but that’s the other side of fun. 
 There are a lot of surprises in light as it comes and goes. The practice of photography seems to me a little like what they say of war—the moments of precision and speed and tension are contained within numbing expanses of banality. 
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