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Ansel Adams Art Quotes - (41 quotes)

Ansel Adams - From the Abstraction category:

In a strict sense photography can never be abstract, for the camera is incapable of synthetic integration. (Ansel Adams)

Ansel Adams - From the Accidents category:

A photograph is not an accident - it is a concept. (Ansel Adams)

Ansel Adams - From the Aging category:

I expect to retire to a fine-grained heaven where the temperatures are always consistent, where the images slide before one's eyes in a continual cascade of form and meaning. (Ansel Adams)

Ansel Adams - From the Art category:

Impression is not enough. Design, style, technique - these, too, are not enough. Art must reach further than impression or self-revelation. (Ansel Adams)

Ansel Adams - From the Audience category:

There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer. (Ansel Adams)

Ansel Adams - From the Awareness category:

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)

Ansel Adams - From the Beauty category:

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)

Ansel Adams - From the Composition category:

I usually have an immediate recognition of the potential image, and I have found that too much concern about matters such as conventional composition may take the edge off the first inclusive reaction. (Ansel Adams)

Ansel Adams - From the Comprehension category:

Myths and creeds are heroic struggles to comprehend the truth in the world. (Ansel Adams)

Ansel Adams - From the Creativity category:

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)

Ansel Adams - From the Difficulty category:

If photography were difficult in the true sense - 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)

Ansel Adams - From the Earth category:

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)

Ansel Adams - From the Environment category:

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

Ansel Adams - From the Exploration category:

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

Ansel Adams - From the Greatness category:

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

Ansel Adams - From the Happiness category:

I believe photography is a tool to express our positive assessment of the world. A tool to acquire ultimate happiness and belief. (Ansel Adams)

Ansel Adams - From the Ideas category:

There is nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept. (Ansel Adams)

Ansel Adams - From the Imagination category:

When I'm ready to make a photograph... I quite obviously see in my mind's eye something that is not literally there... I'm interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without. (Ansel Adams)

Ansel Adams - From the Immortality category:

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)

Ansel Adams - From the Influence category:

We don't make a photograph just with a camera, we bring to the act of photography all the books we have read, the movies we have seen, the music we have heard, the people we have loved. (Ansel Adams)

Ansel Adams - From the Life category:

Life is your art. An open, aware heart is your camera. A oneness with your world is your film. Your bright eyes, your easy smile is your museum. (Ansel Adams)

Ansel Adams - From the Music category:

I can look at a fine art photograph and sometimes I can hear music. (Ansel Adams)

Ansel Adams - From the Mysteries category:

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)

Ansel Adams - From the Nature category:

The artist and the photographer seek the mysteries and the adventure of experience in nature. (Ansel Adams)

Ansel Adams - From the Opportunity category:

Sometimes I get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter. (Ansel Adams)

Ansel Adams - From the Perception category:

Simply look with perceptive eyes at the world about you, and trust to your own reactions and convictions. Ask yourself, 'Does this subject move me to feel, think and dream?' (Ansel Adams)

Ansel Adams - From the Perfection category:

I respect everything in change and the solemn beauty of life and death... and therefore, while man is amidst the immense beauty of objective bodies, he must possess the capacity of self-perfection and must observe and represent his world with full confidence. (Ansel Adams)

Ansel Adams - From the Performance category:

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

Ansel Adams - From the Photography category:

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs. (Ansel Adams)

Ansel Adams - From the Photography category:

You don't take a photograph, you make it. (Ansel Adams)

Ansel Adams - From the Photography category:

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

Ansel Adams - From the Practice category:

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)

Ansel Adams - From the Questions category:

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)

Ansel Adams - From the Reality category:

I have often had a retrospective vision where everything in my past life seems to fall with significance into logical sequence. Intuition, suspicion, or confidence in new ventures; there is a strange strain within me when advantage is not taken of some situation, the immediacy of recognition of the rightness or wrongness of a mood, a response, a decision - they are so often valid that I am increasingly convinced that we have yet to grasp the reality of existence. (Ansel Adams)

Ansel Adams - From the Rules category:

There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs. (Ansel Adams)

Ansel Adams - From the Silence category:

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

Ansel Adams - From the Spectator category:

I am probably afraid that some spectator will not understand my photography - therefore I proceed to make it really less understandable by writing defensibly about it. (Ansel Adams)

Ansel Adams - From the Subject category:

Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment. (Ansel Adams)

Ansel Adams - From the Universe category:

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

Ansel Adams - From the Vision category:

-Ansel Adams, Master Photographers
My last word is that it all depends on what you visualize. (Ansel Adams)

Ansel Adams - From the Words category:

All I can do in my writing is to stimulate a certain amount of thought, clarify some technical facts and date my work. But when I preach sharpness, brilliancy, scale, etc., I am just mouthing words, because no words can really describe those terms and qualities it takes the actual print to say, 'Here it is.' (Ansel Adams)



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Editor: Robert Genn

Assistant Editor: Shawn Jackson

Associate Editors:

Scott Altman, Bonnie Austin, Karen Austin, Michele Becker, Joe Blodgett, Norman Brown, Alyce Bryson, Leanne Cadden, Penny Duane, Max Elliot, Derek Franklin, Sara Genn, Mardy Grothe, Harry Hartley, Sue Holland, Sue Legault, Tammy McManus, Eric Mewhinney, Bruce Miller, Laura Parrish, Andrea Pratt, Dan Roberts, Shirley Rochon, Gilbert Roy, John Sherlock, Victor Wong,
And many others who have so far contributed one quote or a few. Please join us and add more at

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Last modified: May 24, 2013