Ansel Adams Quotes
Ansel Adams was an American Photographer born on February 20, 1902, and died on April 22, 1984.
As a young child, he was an overactive and sickly child with little to no friends. He was always dismissed from various schools so he had to be tutored privately at home.
He later taught himself the piano and in 1916 got interested in photography when he took a trip to Yosemite National Park. He, therefore, learned photo Darkroom Techniques and read a lot of Photography books and magazines to make himself one of the most famous photographers to have ever lived.
He got his breakthrough with the release of his first portfolio, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras, which included his famous image “Monolith, the Face of Half Dome.”
Here are Some of the Best Ansel Adams Quotes about photography, Life, and Nature for Inspiring photographers and old ones for inspiration.
If you love Ansel Adams’s Quotes, you will like Photography Quotes By Famous Photographers like Robert Capa Quotes, Robert Frank Quotes, and Dorothea Lange Quotes.
Famous Ansel Adams Quotes
- You don’t take a photograph, you make it. ― Ansel Adams
- There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer. ― Ansel Adams
- It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment. ― Ansel Adams
- In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration. ― Ansel Adams
- When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence. ― 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 (Ansel Adams quotes Yosemite)
- Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop. ― Ansel Adams
- Millions of men have lived to fight, build palaces and boundaries, and shape destinies and societies; but the compelling force of all times has been the force of originality and creation profoundly affecting the roots 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
Ansel Adams Quotes About Life
- 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
- Sometimes I do get to places just when God’s ready to have somebody click the shutter. ― Ansel Adams
- Myths and creeds are heroic struggles to comprehend the truth in the world. ― 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
- Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe in photographs. ― 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
Ansel Adams Quotes About Photography And Art
Here are some of Ansel Adams’s quotes about photography, photographs, and art. You will love them
- Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communication, offers an infinite variety of perceptions, interpretations, and execution. ― Ansel Adams
- Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships. ― Ansel Adams
- Photography is more than a medium for the factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art. ― 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
- A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words. ― Ansel Adams
- The negative is the equivalent of the composer’s score, and the print of the performance. ― 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
- There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs. ― 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
- When I’m ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my mind’s 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
- The only things in my life that compatibly exists with this grand universe are the creative works of the human spirit. ― Ansel Adams
- Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer – and often the supreme disappointment. ― 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
- 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
- “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
- “To the complaint, ‘There are no people in these photographs,’ I respond, There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.” ― 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
- “There are two people in every photograph: the photographer and the viewer” ― 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 single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it!” ― Ansel Adams
- A photograph is usually looked at – seldom looked into. ― 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.
- 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
- There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept. ― Ansel Adams
- A good photograph is knowing where to stand. ― Ansel Adams
- “I have often had a retrospective vision where everything in my past life seems to fall with significance into logical sequence.” ― 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 don’t know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.” ― Ansel Adams
Ansel Adams Quotes About Nature
Here are some Beautiful Ansel Adams Quotes about Nature and its beauty
- “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 it into you. 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, where everything is sidewise under you and over you, and the clocks stopped long ago.” ― Ansel Adams
- “Both the grand and the intimate aspects of nature can be revealed in the expressive photograph. Both can stir enduring affirmations and discoveries, and can surely help the spectator in his search for identification with the vast world of natural beauty and wonder surrounding him.” ― Ansel Adams
- “With all art expression, when something is seen, it is a vivid experience, sudden, compelling, and inevitable.” ― Ansel Adams