Top 149 Quotes & Sayings by Ansel Adams

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American photographer Ansel Adams.

Last updated on November 3, 2024.

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. He and Fred Archer developed an exacting system of image-making called the Zone System, a method of achieving a desired final print through a deeply technical understanding of how tonal range is recorded and developed during exposure, negative development, and printing. The resulting clarity and depth of such images characterized his photography.

American - Photographer | February 20, 1902 - April 22, 1984

Source: Wikipedia

A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into.

Ansel Adams

The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance.

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

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

Ansel Adams

We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium.

Ansel Adams

Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter.

Ansel Adams

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

Ansel Adams

There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.

Ansel Adams

In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.

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

It is my intention to present - through the medium of photography - intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators.

Ansel Adams

Myths and creeds are heroic struggles to comprehend the truth in the world.

Ansel Adams

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

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

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

Ansel Adams

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.

Ansel Adams

Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.

Ansel Adams

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

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

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

There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.

Ansel Adams

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

Ansel Adams

Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.

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

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

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

Ansel Adams

A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.

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

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

Ansel Adams

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

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

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.

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

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 best picture is around the corner. Like prosperity.

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

The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it!

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

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

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 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

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

Ansel Adams

One of the most important pieces of equipment, for the photographer who really wants to improve, is a great big wastepaper basket.

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

A photograph is not an accident - is a concept. It exists at, or before, the moment of exposure of the negative.

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 can look at a fine art photograph and sometimes I can hear music.

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

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

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

Photograph not only what you see but also what you feel.

Ansel Adams

Bad weather makes for good photography.

Ansel Adams

Once destroyed, nature's beauty cannot be repurchased at any price

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

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

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 believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful - an endless prospect of magic and wonder.

Ansel Adams

A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels...

Ansel Adams

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

Top 149 Quotes & Sayings by Ansel Adams

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