Words That Helped
Quotations Collected by the Photographer Robert Adams
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A collection of quotations compiled by Robert Adams that have inspired his work and life for almost 60 years
This volume is a personal compilation of quotations that have played a vital role in orienting Robert Adams' life as a photographer. Copied down in private notebooks collected over six decades and now edited for the general reader, this meditative tapestry of words addresses the question: "What are the facts of our situation, and how might we respond?" From poets, novelists and songwriters to painters, photographers and more, the book features quotations from a revealing array of historical and contemporary figures including Diane Arbus, Ingmar Bergman, Paul Cézanne, Emily Dickinson, Dag Hammarskjöld, Dorothea Lange, Fran Lebowitz and Alfred Stieglitz. Adams has grouped these quotations into sections that correspond to the larger motifs in his oeuvre, such as "Walking," "Night" and "Long Views." Taken together, they suggest the lineaments of an autobiography, one aimed at helping others by means of lived experience recorded in words.
Robert Adams was born in 1937 in Orange, New Jersey. After earning a PhD in English literature and teaching the subject for several years at Colorado College, he became a photographer in the mid-1960s. Adams has published more than 40 books of photographs, with the changing landscape of the American West as his primary subject. His books with Steidl include Gone? (2009), The Place We Live (2013), From the Missouri West (2018), Los Angeles Spring (2023), Eden (2023) and Summer Nights, Walking (2023). Adams lives and works with his wife in northwest Oregon.
Diane Arbus
Diane Arbus (1923-1971; born in New York) revolutionized the terms of the art she practiced. In addition to Diane Arbus: Revelations (2022), four other volumes of her work have been published by Aperture and have remained continuously in print: Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (1972), Untitled: Diane Arbus (1995), Diane Arbus: A Chronology (2011), and Diane Arbus: A box of ten photographs (2018, with Smithsonian American Art Museum).
Emily Dickinson
Known as “The Myth of Amherst” for her withdrawal from society while still a young women, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) had an inner life that was deeply emotional and intense. She know rapture and despair, pondered the wonder of God and the meaning of death. She broke tradition and was criticized for her seminal experiments with unorthodox phrasing, rhyme and broken meter, within concise verse forms, thus becoming an innovator and forerunner of modern poets.
Flannery O'Connor
FLANNERY O’CONNOR (1925–1964) was born in Savannah, Georgia. She earned her MFA at the University of Iowa, but lived most of her life in the South, where she became an anomaly among post–World War II authors: a Roman Catholic woman whose stated purpose was to reveal the mystery of God’s grace in everyday life. Her work—novels, short stories, letters, and criticism—received a number of awards, including the National Book Award.
William Stafford
William Stafford was born in Hutchinson, Kansas, in 1914, and is known as a pacifist and prolific poet and writer. During his lifetime, he published more than 65 volumes of poetry, including Traveling Through the Dark, which was the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry in 1963. He has received many distinguished honors including the Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a western States Lifetime Achievement Award in Poetry. He also served as the twentieth Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1970 (this position is now known as the Poet Laureate). In 1940, Stafford was drafted and served as a conscientious objector, and later wrote a memoir about conscientious objectors, Down in my Heart. At the time of his death (August 1993), he lived in Portland, OR.
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