Ansel Adams

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

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

A good photograph is knowing where to stand.

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

The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Photography is an investigation of both the outer and the inner worlds. The first experiences with the camera involve looking at the world beyond the lens, trusting the instrument will 'capture' something 'seen.' The terms shoot and take are not accidental; they represent an attitude of conquest and appropriation. Only when the photographer grows into perception and creative impulse does the term make define a condition of empathy between the external and the internal events.

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.

The artist and the photographer seek the mysteries and the adventure of experience in nature.

These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on old dry plates of sixty years ago... I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. Any they in turn seem to be aware of me.

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

You don't make a photograph just with a camera

The technique of 35mm photography appears simple. One is beguiled by the quick viewing and operation, and by the very questionable inclination to make many pictures with the hope that some will be good.

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.