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

 Nothing is so clarifying… as to stand through the opening of an exhibition to which only officials have come. Experiences like that do encourage defiance, however. Why quit when you’re losing? 
 I try to stay away from that word, art, but I suspect myself of catering to prejudices in which I don’t believe. 
 Only the artist's presence in the work can convince us that its affirmation resulted from and has been tested by human experience. Without the photographer in the photograph the view is no more compelling than the product of some anonymous record camera, a machine perhaps capable of happy accident but not of response to form. 
 I suppose I usually work in units of pictures because I try to reach a diverse audience, and because I know, having lived on the edge of the world, how important books can be. I learned to photograph mostly by studying books, and I try now to keep up through books. 
 Basically, you photograph because you like what you see. 
 Over and over again the photographer walks a few steps and peers, rather comically, into the camera; to the exasperation of family and friends, he inventories what seems an endless number of angles; he explains, if asked, that he is trying for effective composition, but hesitates to define it. What he means is that a photographer wants form, an unarguably right relationship of shapes, a visual stability in which all components are equally important. The photographer hopes, in brief, to discover a tension so exact that it is peace. 
 Part of the difficulty in trying to be both an artist and a businessperson is this: You make a picture because you have seen something beyond price; then you are to turn and assign to your record of it a cash value. If the selling is not necessarily a contradiction of the truth in the picture, it is so close to being a contradiction—and the truth is always in shades of gray—that you are worn down by the threat. 
 Photographers who can teach us to love even vacant lots will do so out of the same sense of wholeness that inspired the wilderness photographers of the last twenty-five years (the deepest joy possible in wilderness is, most would agree, the mysterious realization of one’s alliance with it). Beauty, Coleridge wrote, is based in “the unity of the manifold, the coalescence of the diverse.” In this large sense, beautiful photographs of contemporary America will lead us out into daily life by giving us a new understanding of and tolerance for what previously seemed only anarchic and threatening. 
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