Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]
Why do most great pictures look uncontrived? Why do photographers bother with the deception, especially since it so often requires the hardest work of all? The answer is, I think, that the deception is necessary if the goal of art is to be reached: only pictures that look as if they had been easily made can convincingly suggest that beauty is commonplace.
At their best the [nineteenth-century] photographers accepted limitation and faced space as the antitheatrical puzzle it is—a stage without a center. The resulting photos have an element of almost banality about them, but it is exactly this acknowledgement of the plain surface to things that helps legitimize the photographer's difficult claim that the landscape is coherent.
I tried to keep in mind a phrase from a novel by [Yasunari] Kawabata: “my life, a fragment of a landscape.” The same applied, I thought, to each of us...
By definition art is not propaganda; the goal is not to excite people to action but to help them find a sense of wholeness and thereby a sense of calm. But from that we take courage for a re-engagement with the specifics of life.
When photographers get beyond copying the achievements of others, or just repeating their own accidental first successes, they learn that they do not know where in the world they will find pictures. Nobody does.
