Ansel Adams Quotes about Art

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I do not think there is any question of photography being an art form!

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!

Now there is a big turnover in the galleries. The top galleries are getting better all the time. A lot of galleries just struggle along, then a new one comes along. There are certainly a great number of galleries. I think this argues well for the art but there are, of course, a lot of "phonies" in all the arts.

I've always thought photography was an art form, but it had very low appreciation in the beginning, except for some Europeans, and of course Stieglitz. Stieglitz always considered photography to be an art form and is the "father" of the creative concepts of the twentieth century.

There still is some opposition to it in some museums and art schools, but I think photography has really grown into a mature art form.