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

In practice a photographer does not concern himself with philosophical issues while working; he makes photographs, working with subject matter that he thinks will make the pictures.

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

One of the leading uses of photography by the mass media came to be called photojournalism. From the late 'twenties' to the early 'fifties' what might have been the golden age of this speciality - photographers worked largely as the possessors of special and arcane skills, like the ancient priests who practiced and monopolized the skills of pictography or carving or manuscript illumination. In those halcyon days the photographer enjoyed a privileged status.

The very best pictures adapt themselves to many changes in meaning.

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

Photography is choosing where to point your eye-cone.