Ansel Adams Quotes

You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.

It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.

I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful - an endless prospect of magic and wonder.

Let us leave a splendid legacy for our children...let us turn to them and say, this you inherit: guard it well, for it is far more precious than money...and once destroyed, nature's beauty cannot be repurchased at any price.

Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment.

Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space.

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term - meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching - there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.

The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it!

No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.

A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.

Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space. I know of no sculpture, painting or music that exceeds the compelling spiritual command of the soaring shape of granite cliff and dome, of patina of light on rock and forest, and of the thunder and whispering of the falling, flowing waters. At first the colossal aspect may dominate; then we perceive and respond to the delicate and persuasive complex of nature.

In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.

I believe photography is a tool to express our positive assessment of the world. A tool to acquire ultimate happiness and belief.

Wilderness is rapidly becoming one of those aspects of the American dream which is more of the past than of the present. Wilderness is not only a condition of nature, but a state of mind and mood and heart. It cannot be confined to the museum-case status—seen only as a passing diorama from superlative throughways.

There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.

When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.

Life is your art. An open, aware heart is your camera. A oneness with your world is your film. Your bright eyes and easy smile is your museum.

I believe in beauty. I believe in stones and water, air and soil, people and their future and their fate.

Once destroyed, nature's beauty cannot be repurchased at any price

A good photograph is knowing where to stand.

I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

Today, we must realize that nature is revealed in the simplest meadow, wood lot, marsh, stream, or tidepool, as well as in the remote grandeur of our parks and wilderness areas.

The quality of place, the reaction to immediate contact with earth and growing things that have a fugal relationship with mountains and sky, is essential to the integrity of our existence on this planet.

There are no forms in nature. Nature is a vast, chaotic collection of shapes. You as an artist create configurations out of chaos. You make a formal statement where there was none to begin with. All art is a combination of an external event and an internal event… I make a photograph to give you the equivalent of what I felt. Equivalent is still the best word.

I am sure the next step will be the electronic image, and I hope I shall live to see it. I trust that the creative eye will continue to function, whatever technological innovations may develop.

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

Art is both the taking and giving of beauty; the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.

There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.

How high your awareness level is determines how much meaning you get from your world. Photography can teach you to improve your awareness level.

We were in the shadow of the mountains, the light was cool and quiet and no wind was stirring. The aspen trunks were slightly greenish and the leaves were a vibrant yellow.

Some photographers take reality... and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation.

A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into.

We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium.

Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.

There are worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man, beyond history, and beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and the revelations of great art are equally difficult to define; we can grasp them only in the depths of our perceptive spirit.

I believe the approach of the artist and the approach of the environmentalist are fairly close in that both are, to a rather impressive degree, concerned with the affirmation of life.

Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.

The next time you pick up a camera think of it not as an inflexible and automated robot, but as a flexible instrument which you must understand to properly use. An electronic and optical miracle creates nothing on its own! Whatever beauty and excitement it can represent exist in your mind and spirit to begin with.

There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.

Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.

I knew my destiny when I first experienced Yosemite.

Notebook. No photographer should be without one!

Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter.

We either have wild places or we don't. We admit the spiritual-emotional validity of wild, beautiful places or we don't. We have a philosophy of simplicity of experience in these wild places or we don't. We admit an almost religious devotion to the clean exposition of the wild, natural earth or we don't.

Bad weather makes for good photography.

These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on old dry plates of sixty years ago... I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. Any they in turn seem to be aware of me.

I know that I am one with beauty and that my comrades are one. Let our souls be mountains, Let our spirits be stars, Let our hearts be worlds.

I have often had a retrospective vision where everything in my past life seems to fall with significance into logical sequence.

Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.