Ansel Adams Quotes

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.

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

The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.

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

No matter how sophisticated you may be, a large granite mountain cannot be denied - it speaks in silence to the very core of your being.

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.

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

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

Ask yourself, 'Why am I seeing and feeling this? How am I growing? What am I learning?' Remember: Every coincidence is potentially meaningful.

Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real.

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

Image quality is not the product of a machine, but of the person who directs the machine, and there are no limits to imagination and expression.

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!

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.

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

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.

With all art expression, when something is seen, it is a vivid experience, sudden, compelling, and inevitable.

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 best picture is around the corner. Like prosperity.

The craft of photography is the key to good images.

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

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.

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

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 - it is a concept.

Black and white photography is truly quite a 'departure from reality', and the transition from one aspect of visual magic to another was not as complete as many imagine.

If what I see in my mind excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph.

...one sees differently with color photography than black-and-white... in short, visualization must be modified by the specific nature of the equipment and materials being used.

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

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

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

The camera cannot, but the photographer can.

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

You don't take a picture, you make a picture.

I’m interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.

Emphasis on technique is justified only so far as it will simplify and clarify the statement of the photographer's concept.

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

My last word s that it all depends on what you visualize.

All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation.

It is just as important to bring people the evidence of the beauty of the world of nature and of man as it is to give them a document of ugliness, squalor, and despair.

In a strict sense photography can never be abstract, for the camera is incapable of synthetic integration.

I do not think there is any question of photography being an art form!

The [35mm] camera is for life and for people, the swift and intense moments of life.

The herculean task of a photographer is to capture a momentary frame as beautiful in reality, as it would be in a dream.

Knowing what I know now, any photographer worth his salt could make some beautiful things with pinhole cameras.

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.

I am probably afraid that some spectator will not understand my photography - therefore I proceed to make it really less understandable by writing defensibly about it.

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.

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

While the photos at the D.M.V. (New York) will still be taken in color, the engraving is done in grayscale, hence the Ansel Adams feel.