Photography... is either an expression of a cosmic vision, an embodiment of a life movement or it is nothing - to me. (1919)

Photography... is either an expression of a cosmic vision, an embodiment of a life movement or it is nothing - to me. (1919)

If you let other people's vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.

If the photographer is not a discoverer, then he is not an artist.

The existence of a medium, after all, is its absolute justification, if as so many seem to think, it needs one and all comparison of potentialities is useless and irrelevant. Whether a water-color is inferior to an oil, or whether a drawing, an etching, or a photograph is not as important as either, is inconsequent. To have to despise something in order to respect something else is a sign of impotence. [emphasis added] Let us rather accept joyously and with gratitude everything through which the spirit of man seeks to an ever fuller and more intense self-realization.

The decision as to when to photograph, the actual click of the shutter, is partly controlled from the outside, by the flow of life, but it also comes from the mind and the heart of the artist. The photograph is his vision of the world and expresses, however subtly, his values and convictions.

If Ansel Adams gets a thousand dollars a print, I want ten thousand.