Ansel Adams Art Quotations

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

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

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!

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

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.

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

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

All art is the expression of one and the same thing- the relation of the spirit of man to the spirit of other men and to the world.

All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation.

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.

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.

With all art expression, when something is seen, it is a vivid experience, sudden, compelling, and inevitable.

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

Art is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light of the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit.

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

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.

It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium.

I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

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.

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.