Ansel Adams Quotes

34 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Ansel Adams
For me the future of the image is going to be in electronic form. … You will see perfectly beautiful images on an electronic screen. And I'd say that would be very handsome. They would be almost as close as the best reproductions.

Ansel Adams
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.

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

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

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

Ansel Adams
I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term — meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching — there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.

Ansel Adams
You must have certain noble areas of the world left in as close-to-primal condition as possible. You must have quietness and a certain amount of solitude. You must be able to touch the living rock, drink the pure waters, scan the great vistas, sleep under the stars and awaken to the cool dawn wind. Such experiences are the heritage of all people.

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
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
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
Yes, in the sense that the negative is like the composer's score. Then, using that musical analogy, the print is the performance.

Ansel Adams
I would never apologize for photographing rocks. Rocks can be very beautiful. But, yes, people have asked why I don't put people into my pictures of the natural scene. I respond, There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer. That usually doesn't go over at all.

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
We all know the tragedy of the dustbowls, the cruel unforgivable erosions of the soil, the depletion of fish or game, and the shrinking of the noble forests. And we know that such catastrophes shrivel the spirit of the people... The wilderness is pushed back, man is everywhere. Solitude, so vital to the individual man, is almost nowhere.

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

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

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

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

Ansel Adams
When I'm ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my minds eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I'm interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.

Ansel Adams
Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.

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

Ansel Adams