Ansel Adams Quotes

When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.

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.

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

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.

A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.

To the complaint, 'There are no people in these photographs,' I respond, There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.

There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.

Sometimes I arrive just when God's ready to have somone click the shutter.

It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.

There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.

In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

A photograph is usually looked at- seldom looked into.

A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is thereby a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.

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.

Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment.

The camera would miss it all. A magnificent picture is never worth a thousand perfect words. Ansel Adams can be a great artist, but he can never be Shakespeare. His tools are too literal.

There are two people in every photograph: the photographer and the viewer

The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it!

Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space.

I have often had a retrospective vision where everything in my past life seems to fall with significance into logical sequence.

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.

I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.

Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter.

Ansel Adams: "It is horrifying that we must fight our own government in order to save the environment.

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.

Both the grand and the intimate aspects of nature can be revealed in the expressive photograph. Both can stir enduring affirmations and discoveries, and can surely help the spectator in his search for identification with the vast world of natural beauty and wonder surrounding him.

Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships"..

Every experience is a form of exploration.

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 it into you. The skies and land are so enormous, and the detail so precise and exquisite that wherever you are you are isolated in a glowing world between the macro and the micro, where everything is sidewise under you and over you, and the clocks stopped long ago.

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

Good photography is not about ‘Zone Printing’ or any other Ansel Adams nonsense. It’s just about seeing. You either see, or you don’t see. The rest is academic. Photography is simply a function of noticing things. Nothing more.

You don’t take a photograph, you make it.

Ansel Adams said, “Twelve significant photographs in one year is a good crop.

We observe few objects really closely. As we walk on the earth, we observe the external events at two or three arms' lengths. If we ride a horse or drive in an automobile, we are further separated from the immediate surround. We see and photograph "scenery"; our vast world is inadequately described as the "landscape." The most intimate object perceived daily is usually the printed page. The small and commonplace are rarely explored.

And I have come to understand the truth of what Ansel Adams said that you don’t make a photograph just with a camera but that you bring to the act all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard and the people you have loved.

Oh I could be out, rollicking in the ripeness of my flesh and others’, could be drinking things and eating things and rubbing mine against theirs, speculating about this person or that, waving, indicating hello with a sudden upward jutting of my chin, sitting in the backseat of someone else’s car, bumping up and down the San Francisco hills, south of Market, seeing people attacking their instruments, afterward stopping at a bodega, parking, carrying the bottles in a paper bag, the glass clinking, all our faces bright, glowing under streetlamps, down the sidewalk to this or that apartment party, hi, hi, putting the bottles in the fridge, removing one for now, hating the apartment, checking the view, sitting on the arm of a couch and being told not to, and then waiting for the bathroom, staring idly at that ubiquitous Ansel Adams print, Yosemite, talking to a short-haired girl while waiting in the hallway, talking about teeth, no reason really, the train of thought unclear, asking to see her fillings, no, really, I’ll show you mine first, ha ha, then no, you go ahead, I’ll go after you, then, after using the bathroom she is still there, still in the hallway, she was waiting not just for the bathroom but for me, and so eventually we’ll go home together, her apartment, where she lives alone, in a wide, immaculate railroad type place, newly painted, decorated with her mother, then sleeping in her oversized, oversoft white bed, eating breakfast in her light-filled nook, then maybe to the beach for a few hours with the Sunday paper, then wandering home whenever, never- Fuck. We don't even have a baby-sitter.

Edward counseled that a photograph of consequence could be made from just about anything. Subject matter, in itself, was not critical. The understanding of the photographer was.

For me it is most often an immediate reaction; the more I look for something, the less chance there is for finding anything of value.

Wilderness, or wildness is a mystique. A religion, an intense philosophy, a dream of ideal society - these are also mystique. We are not engaged in preserving so many acre-feet of water, so many board-feet of timber, so many billion tons of granite, so many profit possibilities in so many ways for those concerned with the material aspects of the world. Yet, we must accept the fact that human life (at least in the metabolic sense) depends upon the resources of the Earth. As the fisherman depends upon the rivers, lakes and seas, and the farmer upon the land for his existence, so does mankind in general depend upon the beauty of the world about him for his spiritual and emotional existence. From a speech to The Wilderness Society, May 9 1980

In the face of all the present turmoil and unrest and unhappiness… what can a photographer, a writer, a curator do?… To make people aware of the eternal things, to show the relationship of man to nature, to make clear the importance of our heritage, is a task that no one should consider insignificant.… These are days when eloquent statements are needed. —Letter from Beaumont Newhall to Ansel Adams, May 3, 1954

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.

Group f.64 believed that photographic beauty was defined by beautiful prints produced by purely photographic means. The subjects need not be beautiful. What might appear ugly or commonplace could have value through the respectful understanding and expression of the photographer.

The reason [Ansel Adams] is important to us, as I think he is, is because he was a good artist. On his best days, he was a terrific artist. And he found some way to put together the fragments of the world in a way that transformed them into a picture. In the same way that a poet uses the same dictionaries that the rest of us do—all the words are in there, all the words in the poem are [in the dictionary]. It is just a matter of taking a few of them and putting them in the right order. That’s all there is to it. . . . A good picture does something like that.

As to “Aesthetic Considerations,” Ansel counseled, “A photograph that is merely a superficial record of the subject fails as an aesthetic expression of that subject. The expression must be an emotional amplification, and this emotional amplification relates to point of view, organization, revelation of substance through textures, tonal relations, and the perfection of the technical expression of all these elements.”54

Jobs later explained, “We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It’s grammatical, if you think about what we’re trying to say. It’s not think the same, it’s think different. Think a little different, think a lot different, think different. ‘Think differently’ wouldn’t hit the meaning for me.” In order to evoke the spirit of Dead Poets Society, Clow and Jobs wanted to get Robin Williams to read the narration. His agent said that Williams didn’t do ads, so Jobs tried to call him directly. He got through to Williams’s wife, who would not let him talk to the actor because she knew how persuasive he could be. They also considered Maya Angelou and Tom Hanks. At a fund-raising dinner featuring Bill Clinton that fall, Jobs pulled the president aside and asked him to telephone Hanks to talk him into it, but the president pocket-vetoed the request. They ended up with Richard Dreyfuss, who was a dedicated Apple fan. In addition to the television commercials, they created one of the most memorable print campaigns in history. Each ad featured a black-and-white portrait of an iconic historical figure with just the Apple logo and the words “Think Different” in the corner. Making it particularly engaging was that the faces were not captioned. Some of them—Einstein, Gandhi, Lennon, Dylan, Picasso, Edison, Chaplin, King—were easy to identify. But others caused people to pause, puzzle, and maybe ask a friend to put a name to the face: Martha Graham, Ansel Adams, Richard Feynman, Maria Callas, Frank Lloyd Wright, James Watson, Amelia Earhart. Most were Jobs’s personal heroes. They tended to be creative people who had taken risks, defied failure, and bet their career on doing things in a different way.

Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution. -Ansel Adams

I don’t think Ansel Adams Photoshopped any of his images,” Nick said, leaning forward. “That was all his eye, his skill as an artist.

The best photographers do not need 50000 dollars worth of gear. Look what Ansel Adams did with a Kodak brownie camera. A good photographer has a way of seeing (perspective) that is different from the mundane.

He realized the one bit of photographic advice he’d never gotten from his father or Ansel Adams was the need to nurture an emotional bond with his subject, something portrait photographers had always capitalized on. To incorporate this into landscape photography would be a little “out there” to the masses, but for Randy it was a slap on the forehead.

Even their environments were opposites, and that matters. A painter can paint anywhere; the subject can spring from the painter’s mind. Photographers must be in the presence of their subjects. Stieglitz lived in and photographed a long-tamed landscape, from his skyscraper forests to the fenced pastures of his family’s summerhouse outside the city. Edward could see the snow-capped San Gabriel Mountains from his front porch, and even Los Angeles had been wilderness not that long before.

The name Sierra is already a plural. To add an s is a linguistic, Californian, and mountaineering sin.

Breton, heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud, believed that art should be freed from the brake placed on creativity by the conscious mind.

You don’t take a photograph, you make it’ (Ansel Adams)

Although Reed tried valiantly, the income from print sales never balanced out the high cost of framing, advertising, printing announcements, and the rent on New York’s prestigious gallery row, West Fifty-seventh Street. She confessed that the Delphic Studios were “a philanthropic endeavor rather than a business enterprise” and that, sadly, “sales were so infrequent as to make hope of any return at all from commissions a remote possibility.

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

A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense, and is, thereby, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.” —Ansel Adams

Who’s Sally Bowles?” asked Ben. I turned and looked at my younger, less theatrical half. “She used to be married to Ansel Adams.” “You’re kidding?” “Yes, I am,” I said. Jake

Stieglitz solidified the commitment first inspired in Ansel by Edward Carpenter, to reveal the greater reality that surrounds us, but of which too few are conscious. Ansel now believed that he, too, could capture this evanescence on film, as a proof for all to see, a glimpse of the intrinsic beauty that is life’s foundation.

The world does not need more books on equipment. It is my intention in this book to stir excitement for photography and its craft in terms of personal expression. Too many people merely do what they are told to do. The greatest satisfaction derives from the realization of your individual potential, perceiving something in your own way and expressing it through adequate understanding of your tools. Take advantage of everything; be dominated by nothing except your own convictions. Do not lose sight of the essential importance of craft; every worthwhile human endeavor depends on the highest levels of concentration and mastery of basic tools.

I believe in beauty. I believe in stones and water, air and soil, people and their future and their fate.

I have often said that the negative is similar to a musician's score, and the print to the performance of that score. The negative comes to life only when "performed" as a print.

The important and only vital question is, how much greater, finer, am I than I was yesterday? Have I fulfilled my possibilities, made the most of my potentialities. What a marvelous world if all would, could hold this attitude toward life.34