What Compels You to Keep Looking?

Robert Adams' image from Summer Nights Walking. from here.

In What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World,  Robert Hass writing about Robert Adams and Ansel Adams observes:

What the two artists have in common, besides a name, is a certain technical authority. The source of that authority is mysterious to me. But it is that thing in their images that, when you look at them, compels you to keep looking. I think it’s something to do with the formal imagination. I don’t know whether photographers find it in the world, or when they look through the viewfinder, or when they work in the darkroom, but the effect is a calling together of all the elements of an image so that the photograph feels like it is both prior to the act of seeing and the act of seeing. Attention, Simone Weil said, is prayer, and form in art is the way attention comes to life.

What compels you to keep looking?



Hass, Robert (2012-08-14). What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World (p. 2). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.