48 Quotes by Galen Rowell

What I mean by photographing as a participant rather than observer is that I'm not only involved directly with some of the activities that I photograph, such as mountain climbing, but even when I'm not I have the philosophy that my mind and body are part of the natural world.

A lot of people think that when you have grand scenery, such as you have in Yosemite, that photography must be easy.

My mountaineering skills are not important to my best photographs, but they do add a component to my work that is definitely a bit different than that of most photographers.

Wanting to take a light camera with me when I climb or do mountain runs has kept me using exclusively 35 mm.

I remember when an editor at the National Geographic promised to run about a dozen of my landscape pictures from a story on the John Muir trail as an essay, but when the group of editors got together, someone said that my pictures looked like postcards.

I began to realise that film sees the world differently than the human eye, and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed.

I think landscape photography in general is somewhat undervalued.

Today, I'm very careful not to mention very specific locations when I write or give captions.

The reason that I keep writing is that all my most powerful messages about the fates of wild places that I care about need to have words as well as images.