Ansel Adams Short Quotes

24 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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
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
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
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
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
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
I believe the approach of the artist and the approach of the environmentalist are fairly close in that both are, to a rather impressive degree, concerned with the affirmation of life.

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
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