190 Quotes by Ansel Adams

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.

It is increasingly clear to me that my art relates more and more to a sublimation of my closeness to the natural world, it's events, light itself, and the positive it is a personal expression based on observation and reaction, that I am not able to define except in terms of the work itself.

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

For me the future of the image is going to be in electronic form ... You will see perfectly beautiful images on an electronic screen. And Id say that would be very handsome. They would be almost as close as the best reproductions.

I am always surprised when I see several cameras, a gaggle on lenses, filters, meters, et cetera, rattling around in a soft bag with a complement of refuse and dust. Sometimes the professional is the worst offender!

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.

At one with the power of the American landscape, and renowned for the patient skill and timeless beauty of his work, photographer Ansel Adams has been visionary in his efforts to preserve this country's wild and scenic areas, both in film and on Earth. Drawn to the beauty of nature's monuments, he is regarded by environmentalists as a monument himself, and by photographers as a national institution. It is through his foresight and fortitude that so much of America has been saved for future Americans.

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.

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 into you.