Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]
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.
If the dead end of the romantic vision is incoherence, the failure of classicism, which is the outlook I am defending, is the cliché, the ten thousandth camera-club imitation of a picture by Ansel Adams.
Photography is new, I submit, because it is among the few arts that have, through the twentieth century, remained attentive to the facts of this world, to the actual appearance of the place that troubles us.
Photographers are open to gifts. As the poet John Clare wrote, “I found the poems in the fields / And only wrote them down.”
Landscape photography 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... the three kinds of representation strengthen each other and reinforce what we all work to keep intact—an affection for life
Beauty and its implication of promise is the metaphor that gives art its value. It helps us rediscover some of our best intuitions, the ones that encourage caring.
In response to the question, “What's new?” we can answer with conviction that photography is new. We can make this claim not because it was invented rather recently, and not primarily because of photography’s changing technology (there are forms of art with more advanced hardware), but because photography is by its nature forced toward doing the old job of art—of discovering and revealing meaning from within the confusing detail of life.
As all photographers know, one good picture next to another good picture and you have a third something. It may be better, it may be worse, but putting pictures next to each other inevitably influences the nature of both pictures.
