If you’re looking for some quotes by the revered photographer Ansel Adams, here are some of the best Ansel Adams quotes that we’re sure you’ll love. Ansel Easton Adams was a landscape photographer and an environmentalist who was well known for his black and white images.
He was born on 20 February 1902 in California, United States, and died at the age of 82 on 22 April 1984. He used his photography as a way to promote and protect the wilderness areas. His images helped establish the field of photography as art. He advocated for the conservation of the environment, and he spoke for the protection of the environment for his entire life.
He was even awarded the presidential medal of freedom in 1980 for his contribution to art and environmental conservation. After years of his death, he lives on through the photographs that he took. Here are some beautiful Ansel Adams Quotes that are as beautiful as the photos he took.
Ansel Adams Quotes About Photography
Photography is an art form, and when a photographer stands behind the lens, he projects his vision for the world to see. Through the pictures that he captures, you can see inside his soul and perceive the person that lives behind his flesh and bones. Here are some wonderful Ansel Adams Quotes About Photography that can help you comprehend how important photography is.
1. “Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.”
2. “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”
3. “To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces.”
4. “Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer – and often the supreme disappointment.”
5. “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.”
6. “Notebook. No photographer should be without one.”
7. “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.”
8. “Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.”
9. “The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it.”
10. “Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.”
11. “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.”
12. “The craft of photography is the key to good images.”
13. “A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.”
14. “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.”
15. “It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium.”
16. “Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.”
17. “There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.”
18. “Sometimes I do get to places just when God’s ready to have somebody click the shutter.”
19. “A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.”
20. “I can look at a fine art photograph and sometimes I can hear music.”
21. “There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.”
22. “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!”
23. “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”
24. “It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.”
25. “There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.”
26.“Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real.”
27. “A good photograph is knowing where to stand.”
28. “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.”
29. “A photograph is not an accident – it is a concept.”
30. “A photograph is usually looked at – seldom looked into.”
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Ansel Adams Quotes About Environment and Nature
One of the most beautiful things that we live in is nature. Full of natural beauty and wonder, the Earth is truly a beautiful place to be in. Sadly, people are destroying the environment and nature in the name of progress. Here are some Ansel Adams Quotes About Environment and Nature that explain the importance of conservation of the environment we live in.
1. “I believe in beauty. I believe in stones and water, air and soil, people and their future and their fate.”
2. “Bad weather makes for good photography.”
3. “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.”
4. “It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.”
5. “It is my intention to present – through the medium of photography – intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators.”
6. “There are no forms in nature. Nature is a vast, chaotic collection of shapes. You as an artist create configurations out of chaos. You make a formal statement where there was none to begin with. All art is a combination of an external event and an internal event… I make a photograph to give you the equivalent of what I felt. Equivalent is still the best word.”
7. “The artist and the photographer seek the mysteries and the adventure of experience in nature.”
8. The only things in my life that compatibly exists with this grand universe are the creative works of the human spirit.
9. “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”
10. Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space.
11. “Once destroyed, nature’s beauty cannot be repurchased at any price”
12. “I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful – an endless prospect of magic and wonder.”
13. “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.”
14. “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.”
15. “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.”
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Ansel Adams Quotes About Printing
Ansel Adams perceived his work as a piece of art in which the negative is the score, and the print is the performance, meaning you present to the world with your art by portraying it in the most beautiful way possible. Here are some brilliant Ansel Adams Quotes About Printing that lets us understand that a photo is more than something you take; it is an artwork that you make.
1. “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.”
2. “The negative is comparable to the composer’s score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.”
3. “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.”
4. “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.”
5. “The negative is the score, and the print the performance.”
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Ansel Adams Famous Quotes
1. “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.”
2. “Impression is not enough. Design, style, technique – these, too, are not enough. Art must reach further than impression or self-revelation .”
3. “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.”
4. “I’m interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.”
5. “The term accessories has come to include a host of photographic gadgets of questionable value…”
6. “I don’t know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.”“I don’t know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.”
7. “Myths and creeds are heroic struggles to comprehend the truth in the world.”
8. “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.”
9. “We all move on the fringes of eternity and are sometimes granted vistas through fabric of illusion.”
10. “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.”