Ansel Adams Quotes

34 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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 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
The disciples are drawn to the high altars with magnetic certainty, knowing that a great Presence hovers over the ranges... You were within the portals of the temple... to enter the wilderness and seek, in the primal patterns of nature, a magical union with beauty.

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

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

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

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
Wilderness is rapidly becoming one of those aspects of the American dream which is more of the past than of the present. Wilderness is not only a condition of nature, but a state of mind and mood and heart. It cannot be confined to the museum-case status—seen only as a passing diorama from superlative throughways.

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
I know that I am one with beauty and that my comrades are one. Let our souls be mountains, Let our spirits be stars, Let our hearts be worlds.

Ansel Adams
The only things in my life that compatibly exist with this grand universe are the creative works of the human spirit.

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

Ansel Adams
It is horrifying that we have to fight our own Government to save the environment.

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

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
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
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.

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
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
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