Ansel Adams famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space.
-- Ansel Adams -
Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.
-- Ansel Adams -
In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.
-- Ansel Adams -
You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.
-- Ansel Adams -
Today, we must realize that nature is revealed in the simplest meadow, wood lot, marsh, stream, or tidepool, as well as in the remote grandeur of our parks and wilderness areas.
-- Ansel Adams -
The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it!
-- Ansel Adams -
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.
-- Ansel Adams -
There are worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man, beyond history, and beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and the revelations of great art are equally difficult to define; we can grasp them only in the depths of our perceptive spirit.
-- Ansel Adams -
I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.
-- Ansel Adams -
No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.
-- Ansel Adams -
There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.
-- Ansel Adams -
Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment.
-- Ansel Adams -
A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.
-- Ansel Adams -
It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.
-- Ansel Adams -
There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.
-- Ansel Adams -
There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.
-- Ansel Adams -
I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful - an endless prospect of magic and wonder.
-- Ansel Adams -
When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.
-- Ansel Adams -
A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into.
-- Ansel Adams -
You don't make a photograph just with a camera
-- Ansel Adams -
I’m interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.
-- Ansel Adams -
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.
-- Ansel Adams -
I hope that my work will encourage self expression in others and stimulate the search for beauty and creative excitement in the great world around us.
-- Ansel Adams -
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.
-- Ansel Adams -
Life is your art. An open, aware heart is your camera. A oneness with your world is your film. Your bright eyes and easy smile is your museum.
-- Ansel Adams -
Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.
-- Ansel Adams -
A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.
-- Ansel Adams -
Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter.
-- Ansel Adams -
Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.
-- Ansel Adams -
Myths and creeds are heroic struggles to comprehend the truth in the world.
-- Ansel Adams -
The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.
-- Ansel Adams -
Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.
-- Ansel Adams -
Photography is an investigation of both the outer and the inner worlds. The first experiences with the camera involve looking at the world beyond the lens, trusting the instrument will 'capture' something 'seen.' The terms shoot and take are not accidental; they represent an attitude of conquest and appropriation. Only when the photographer grows into perception and creative impulse does the term make define a condition of empathy between the external and the internal events.
-- Ansel Adams -
A photograph is not an accident - it is a concept.
-- Ansel Adams -
I can look at a fine art photograph and sometimes I can hear music.
-- Ansel Adams -
The ‘machine-gun’ approach to photography – by which many negatives are made with the hope that one will be good – is fatal to serious results.
-- Ansel Adams -
I am sure the next step will be the electronic image, and I hope I shall live to see it. I trust that the creative eye will continue to function, whatever technological innovations may develop.
-- Ansel Adams -
I eagerly await new concepts and processes. I believe that the electronic image will be the next major advance. Such systems will have their own inherent and inescapable structural characteristics, and the artist and functional practitioner will again strive to comprehend and control them.
-- Ansel Adams -
The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.
-- Ansel Adams -
The negative is the score, and the print the performance.
-- Ansel Adams -
To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces.
-- Ansel Adams -
Once destroyed, nature's beauty cannot be repurchased at any price
-- Ansel Adams -
This profession [photography] is deserving of attention and respect equal to that accorded painting, literature, music and architecture.
-- Ansel Adams -
I usually have an immediate recognition of the potential image, and I have found that too much concern about matters such as conventional composition may take the edge off the first inclusive reaction.
-- Ansel Adams -
I believe in beauty. I believe in stones and water, air and soil, people and their future and their fate.
-- Ansel Adams -
The artist and the photographer seek the mysteries and the adventure of experience in nature.
-- Ansel Adams -
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.
-- Ansel Adams -
The next time you pick up a camera think of it not as an inflexible and automated robot, but as a flexible instrument which you must understand to properly use. An electronic and optical miracle creates nothing on its own! Whatever beauty and excitement it can represent exist in your mind and spirit to begin with.
-- Ansel Adams -
It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium.
-- Ansel Adams -
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.
-- Ansel Adams -
Let us leave a splendid legacy for our children...let us turn to them and say, this you inherit: guard it well, for it is far more precious than money...and once destroyed, nature's beauty cannot be repurchased at any price.
-- Ansel Adams -
Impression is not enough. Design, style, technique - these, too, are not enough. Art must reach further than impression or self-revelation .
-- Ansel Adams -
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.
-- Ansel Adams -
Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space. I know of no sculpture, painting or music that exceeds the compelling spiritual command of the soaring shape of granite cliff and dome, of patina of light on rock and forest, and of the thunder and whispering of the falling, flowing waters. At first the colossal aspect may dominate; then we perceive and respond to the delicate and persuasive complex of nature.
-- Ansel Adams -
The term accessories has come to include a host of photographic gadgets of questionable value...
-- Ansel Adams -
"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?""
-- Ansel Adams -
Notebook. No photographer should be without one!
-- Ansel Adams -
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!
-- Ansel Adams -
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.
-- Ansel Adams -
The only things in my life that compatibly exists with this grand universe are the creative works of the human spirit.
-- Ansel Adams -
It is my intention to present - through the medium of photography - intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators.
-- Ansel Adams -
Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.
-- Ansel Adams -
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.
-- Ansel Adams -
The craft of photography is the key to good images.
-- Ansel Adams -
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.
-- Ansel Adams -
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.
-- Ansel Adams -
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.
-- Ansel Adams -
Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real.
-- Ansel Adams -
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.
-- Ansel Adams -
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.
-- Ansel Adams -
The quality of place, the reaction to immediate contact with earth and growing things that have a fugal relationship with mountains and sky, is essential to the integrity of our existence on this planet.
-- Ansel Adams -
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.
-- Ansel Adams -
We all move on the fringes of eternity and are sometimes granted vistas through fabric of illusion.
-- Ansel Adams
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