Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating “pure” photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. These Ansel Adams quotes will motivate you.
Best Ansel Adams Quotes
- “Photograph not only what you see but also what you feel.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “Let us leave a splendid legacy for our children…let us turn to them and say, this you inherit: guard it well, for it is far more precious than money…and once destroyed, nature’s beauty cannot be repurchased at any price.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful – an endless prospect of magic and wonder.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “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.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.” ~ Ansel Adams
-
“It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “Bad weather makes for good photography.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “I believe in beauty. I believe in stones and water, air and soil, people and their future and their fate.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “Sometimes I do get to places just when God’s ready to have somebody click the shutter.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “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.” ~ Ansel Adams
-
“Once destroyed, nature’s beauty cannot be repurchased at any price” ~ Ansel Adams
- “A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “A good photograph is knowing where to stand.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “The piano has eighty-eight keys, and you have to be able to play all of them. And the range of white to black is analogous to the eighty-eight keys and you have to be able to play all eighty-eight keys in that palette from white to black.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it!” ~ Ansel Adams
- “There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.” ~ Ansel Adams
-
“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “I can’t verbalize the internal meaning of pictures whatsoever. Some of my friends can at very mystical levels, but I prefer to say that, if I feel something strongly, I would make a photograph, that would be the equivalent of what I saw and felt.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “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.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “We all move on the fringes of eternity and are sometimes granted vistas through fabric of illusion. Many refuse to admit it: I feel a mystery exists. There are certain times, when, as on the whisper of the wind, there comes a clear and quiet realization that there is indeed a presence in the world, a nonhuman entity that is not necessarily inhuman.” ~ Ansel Adams
-
“Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “I know the importance of highly trained awareness of the “moment” and the immediate and intuitive response of the photographer. It should be obvious to all that photographers whose images possess character and quality have attained them only by continued practice and total dedication to the medium.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “We either have wild places or we don’t. We admit the spiritual-emotional validity of wild, beautiful places or we don’t. We have a philosophy of simplicity of experience in these wild places or we don’t. We admit an almost religious devotion to the clean exposition of the wild, natural earth or we don’t.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “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
-
“There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” ~ 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
- “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.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “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.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “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.” ~ Ansel Adams , Ansel Adams quotes on work
- “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.” ~ Ansel Adams
-
“There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer – and often the supreme disappointment.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space. I know of no sculpture, painting or music that exceeds the compelling spiritual command of the soaring shape of granite cliff and dome, of patina of light on rock and forest, and of the thunder and whispering of the falling, flowing waters. At first the colossal aspect may dominate; then we perceive and respond to the delicate and persuasive complex of nature.” ~ Ansel Adams
-
“Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.” ~ 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
- “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
- “A photograph is usually looked at – seldom looked into.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “Art is both the taking and giving of beauty; the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “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.” ~ Ansel Adams
-
“I can look at a fine art photograph and sometimes I can hear music.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “Ask yourself, ‘Why am I seeing and feeling this? How am I growing? What am I learning?’ Remember: Every coincidence is potentially meaningful.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “I think we can not categorize. Things do not fit into a mold.” ~ Ansel Adams Quotes
- “The next time you pick up a camera think of it not as an inflexible and automated robot, but as a flexible instrument which you must understand to properly use. An electronic and optical miracle creates nothing on its own! Whatever beauty and excitement it can represent exist in your mind and spirit to begin with.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “How high your awareness level is determines how much meaning you get from your world. Photography can teach you to improve your awareness level.” ~ Ansel Adams
-
“The artist and the photographer seek the mysteries and the adventure of experience in nature.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “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.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels…” ~ Ansel Adams
- “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.” ~ Ansel Adams
-
“The camera cannot, but the photographer can.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “The best picture is around the corner. Like prosperity.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “I never know in advance what I will photograph,…I Go Out into the World and Hope I Will come across something that Imperatively interests me. I Am Addicted to the Found object. I have No doubt that I Will Continue to make Photographs till my last Breath.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “You don’t make a photograph just with a camera” ~ Ansel Adams
- “Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.” ~ Ansel Adams
-
“The craft of photography is the key to good images.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “The ‘machine-gun’ approach to photography – by which many negatives are made with the hope that one will be good – is fatal to serious results.” ~ 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
- “Image quality is not the product of a machine, but of the person who directs the machine, and there are no limits to imagination and expression.” ~ Ansel Adams
-
“Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.” ~ Ansel Adams
- “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.” ~ 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
- “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
- “Impression is not enough. Design, style, technique – these, too, are not enough. Art must reach further than impression or self-revelation .” ~ Ansel Adams
