Ansel Adams Quotes

The craft of photography is the key to good images.

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

The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.

Impression is not enough. Design, style, technique - these, too, are not enough. Art must reach further than impression or self-revelation .

We all move on the fringes of eternity and are sometimes granted vistas through fabric of illusion. Many refuse to admit it: I feel a mystery exists. There are certain times, when, as on the whisper of the wind, there comes a clear and quiet realization that there is indeed a presence in the world, a nonhuman entity that is not necessarily inhuman.

I tried to keep both arts alive, but the camera won. I found that while the camera does not express the soul, perhaps a photograph can!

The term accessories has come to include a host of photographic gadgets of questionable value.

You don't make a photograph just with a camera

It is all very beautiful and magical here - a quality which cannot be described. You have to live it and breathe it, let the sun bake into you.

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

I eagerly await new concepts and processes. I believe that the electronic image will be the next major advance. Such systems will have their own inherent and inescapable structural characteristics, and the artist and functional practitioner will again strive to comprehend and control them.

I knew my destiny when I first experienced Yosemite.

We all know the tragedy of the dustbowls, the cruel unforgivable erosions of the soil, the depletion of fish or game, and the shrinking of the noble forests. And we know that such catastrophes shrivel the spirit of the people... The wilderness is pushed back, man is everywhere. Solitude, so vital to the individual man, is almost nowhere.

Myths and creeds are heroic struggles to comprehend the truth in the world.

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.

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.

Bad weather makes for good photography.

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.

The best picture is around the corner. Like prosperity.

I can't verbalize the internal meaning of pictures whatsoever. Some of my friends can at very mystical levels, but I prefer to say that, if I feel something strongly, I would make a photograph, that would be the equivalent of what I saw and felt.

When I'm ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my minds eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I'm interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.

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.

Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real.

It is my intention to present - through the medium of photography - intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators.

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.

Photography is an investigation of both the outer and the inner worlds. The first experiences with the camera involve looking at the world beyond the lens, trusting the instrument will 'capture' something 'seen.' The terms shoot and take are not accidental; they represent an attitude of conquest and appropriation. Only when the photographer grows into perception and creative impulse does the term make define a condition of empathy between the external and the internal events.

We all move on the fringes of eternity and are sometimes granted vistas through fabric of illusion.

To visualize an image (in whole or in part) is to see clearly in the mind prior to exposure, a continuous projection from composing the image through the final print.

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

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

This profession [photography] is deserving of attention and respect equal to that accorded painting, literature, music and architecture.

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.

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

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

I hope that my work will encourage self expression in others and stimulate the search for beauty and creative excitement in the great world around us.

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

Now there is a big turnover in the galleries. The top galleries are getting better all the time. A lot of galleries just struggle along, then a new one comes along. There are certainly a great number of galleries. I think this argues well for the art but there are, of course, a lot of "phonies" in all the arts.

I never know in advance what I will photograph,...I Go Out into the World and Hope I Will come across something that Imperatively interests me. I Am Addicted to the Found object. I have No doubt that I Will Continue to make Photographs till my last Breath.

Photograph not only what you see but also what you feel.

There still is some opposition to it in some museums and art schools, but I think photography has really grown into a mature art form.

The (photographic) negative is the equivalent of the composers score and the print is the equivalent of the conductors performance.

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

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

It is increasingly clear to me that my art relates more and more to a sublimation of my closeness to the natural world, it's events, light itself, and the positive it is a personal expression based on observation and reaction, that I am not able to define except in terms of the work itself.

It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium.

I know the importance of highly trained awareness of the “moment” and the immediate and intuitive response of the photographer. It should be obvious to all that photographers whose images possess character and quality have attained them only by continued practice and total dedication to the medium.

Photography has escalated almost exponentially! It is a language which covers almost every aspect of communication; factual and expressive.

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