Ansel Adams Quotes

A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.

"Simply look with perceptive eyes at the world about you, and trust to your own reactions and convictions. Ask yourself: "Does this subject move me to feel, think and dream? Can I visualize a print - my own personal statement of what I feel and want to convey - from the subject before me?""

Millions of men have lived to fight, build palaces and boundaries, shape destinies and societies; but the compelling force of all times has been the force of originality and creation profoundly affecting the roots of human spirit.

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.

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.

We who are gathered here may represent a particular delete, not of money and power, but of concern for the earth for the earth's sake.

To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces and record the qualities of nature and humanity which live or are latent in all things.

The whole world is, to me, very much "alive" - all the little growing things, even the rocks. I can't look at a swell bit of grass and earth, for instance, without feeling the essential life - the things going on - within them. The same goes for a mountain, or a bit of the ocean, or a magnificent piece of old wood.

It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.

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

The skies and land are so enormous, and the detail so precise and exquisite that wherever you are you are isolated in a glowing world between the macro and the micro.

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

Photography and photographers have an inevitable development. They progress more or less by steps. Every five or ten years some new point of view is developed and young people are inclined to follow it.

I respect everything in change and the solemn beauty of life and death... and therefore, while man is amidst the immense beauty of objective bodies, he must possess the capacity of self-perfection and must observe and represent his world with full confidence.

The negative is the score, and the print the performance.

The only things in my life that compatibly exists with this grand universe are the creative works of the human spirit.

A photograph is not an accident - is a concept. It exists at, or before, the moment of exposure of the negative.

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.

If you have enough craft, you've done your homework and you're practiced. You can then make the photograph you desire.

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.

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.

The photo-journalist and the photo-poet are both important. The problem is to separate the major objectives of the various groups and not to attribute qualities and intentions where they do not belong.

I can look at a fine art photograph and sometimes I can hear music.

My wife - she could help me get the negs out!

In my mind's eye, I visualize how a particular... sight and feeling will appear on a print. If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice.

All I can do in my writing is to stimulate a certain amount of thought, clarify some technical facts and date my work. But when I preach sharpness, brilliancy, scale, etc., I am just mouthing words, because no words can really describe those terms and qualities it takes the actual print to say, “here it is.

Both the grand and the intimate aspects of nature can be revealed in the expressive photograph. Both can stir enduring affirmations and discoveries, and can surely help the spectator in his search for identification with the vast world of natural beauty and wonder surrounding him.

To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces.

Notebook. No photographer should be without one!

Art is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light of the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit.

I think we can not categorize. Things do not fit into a mold.

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

All art is the expression of one and the same thing- the relation of the spirit of man to the spirit of other men and to the world.

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

I expect to retire to a fine-grained heaven where the temperatures are always consistent, where the images slide before one's eyes in a continual cascade of form and meaning.

For me the future of the image is going to be in electronic form... You will see perfectly beautiful images on an electronic screen. And Id say that would be very handsome. They would be almost as close as the best reproductions.

A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into.

We make images to "honor what is greater and more interesting than we are."

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

One of the most important pieces of equipment, for the photographer who really wants to improve, is a great big wastepaper basket.

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.

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

As the fisherman depends upon the rivers, lakes and seas and the farmer upon the land for his existence, so does mankind in general depend upon the beauty of the world about him for his spiritual and emotional existence.