Trained as a musician, [photographer Ansel] Adams understood the richness of variation that could be unfolded from a simple theme.

It isn't what a picture is of, it is what it is about.

A photographer's best work is, alas, generally done for himself.

Photography is the easiest thing in the world if one is willing to accept pictures that are flaccid, limp, bland, banal, indiscriminately informative, and pointless. But if one insists in a photograph that is both complex and vigorous it is almost impossible

Like an organism, photography was born whole. It is in our progressive discovery of it that its history lies.

Whatever else a photograph may be about, it is inevitably about photography, the container and vehicle of all its meanings.

The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process - a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made - constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes - but photographs, as the man on the street put, were taken.