Landscape Photography Quotes

I think landscape photography in general is somewhat undervalued. ~ Galen Rowell

I almost never set out to photograph a landscape, nor do I think of my camera as a means of recording a mountain or an animal unless I absolutely need a 'record shot'. My first thought is always of light. ~ Galen Rowell

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

Perhaps the central question about [Eliot] Porter's work is about the relationship between science, aesthetics, and environmental politics. His brother, the painter and critic Fairfield Porter, wrote in a 1960 review of [Porter's] colour photographs: 'There is no subject and background, every corner is alive,' and this suggests what an ecological aesthetic might look like. ~ Rebecca Solnit

A photograph is an opportunity to keep a moment forever. ~ Destin Sparks

I am sure the next step will be the electronic image, and I hope I shall live to see it. I trust that the creative eye will continue to function, whatever technological innovations may develop. ~ Ansel Adams

Ever since the 1860s when photographers travelled the American West and brought photographs of scenic wonders back to the people on the East Coast of America we have had a North American tradition of landscape photography used for the environment. ~ Galen Rowell

[David Lean's] images stay with me forever. But what makes them memorable isn't necessarily their beauty. That's just good photography. It's the emotion behind those images that's meant the most to me over the years. It's the way David Lean can put feeling on film. The way he shows a whole landscape of the spirit. For me, that's the real geography of David Lean country. And that's why, in a David Lean movie, there's no such thing as an empty landscape. ~ Martin Scorsese

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

Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world. ~ Arnold Newman

It's possible to think of photography as an act of editing, a matter of where you put your rectangle pull it out or take it away. Sometimes people ask me about films, cameras and development times in order to find out how to do landscape photography. The first thing I do in landscape photography is go out there and talk to the land - form a relationship, ask permission, it's not about going out there like some paparazzi with a Leica and snapping a few pictures, before running off to print them. ~ Michael Kenna

Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment. ~ Ansel Adams

We rely, I think, on landscape photography to make intelligible to us what we already know. ~ Robert Adams

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs. ~ Ansel Adams

I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style. ~ Ken Burns

A photograph is usually looked at- seldom looked into. ~ Ansel Adams

Photography is the art of making memories tangible. ~ Destin Sparks

Photography is the story I fail to put into words. ~ Destin Sparks

I made 10 times as many images as the other students," he says of the early years. "I destroyed all those negatives except a few. I did it as a reminder that you can't afford to waste time: take it seriously. ~ Emmet Gowin

Whenever I go on holiday, I like to time travel and imagine what it must have been like 500 years ago. I love the Tuscan landscape, which is reminiscent of a Claude Lorrain painting. ~ Jools Holland

A famous artist is approached by a student. "You don't remember me," the student says correctly, "but years ago you said something that changed my life. You said, 'Photography is death.' After that," says the student, "I threw out my camera. I began again. I want to thank you for changing my life."

"Leave me alone," says the artist. "Photography is life. ~ Amy Hempel

The landscape with its violent, pure colours dazzled and blinded me. I was always uncertain ... ~ Paul Gauguin

Nothing is more hateful to me than photography coated with gimmicks, poses and false effects. Therefore let me speak the truth in all honesty about our age and the people of our age ~ August Sander

The landscape started hard, sharp black mountains over my shoulder and thirsty young saguaros hugging patchy dirt. Gradually it let go, began to green on me a little. I crossed a river, watched succulents get fatter and farmland start to wave, hoarding the blue above and the few clouds it had to spare.

I knew the route somehow, knew the curves, the directions, the exact way to go. I knew it the way you know the stars are still up in the sky even though white sun obscures them. Everything that had happened before Lukeville and Sonoita began to liquify in memory, feeling more like fiction than personal history. Funerals and pain, girlfriends and mothers, roommates and priests all tumble away with the desert behind me. The only thing that's real is the road I see ahead. The only person in my life is the man sitting silently beside me. The place I'm going is the only place I've ever wanted to go. ~ Laurie Perez

I wanted [photography] to be more than a document, to be something that is as close as you could possibly be to the subject. ~ Chris Killip

For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches - and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood. ~ Roland Barthes

One of Still Lifes many achievements is its paradoxical mix of intensity and stillness. Alexander Longs visions of landscape, identity and "History itself, a joke that no one gets" are simultaneously meditative and alert, restless and focused. This is a smart, compassionate poet. Still Life is a mesmerizing new book. ~ Terrance Hayes

As the possibilities for straightforward photography seem to have become exhausted it has been the photographers who know about the history of art, not simply the history of photography, who have shaped important directions for the future. ~ Van Deren Coke

It wasn't that we didn't know history. Even if you only count the real world, we knew more history than most people. We'd been taught about cavemen and Normans and Tudors. We knew about Greeks and Romans. We knew masses of personal stories about World War II. We even knew quite a lot of family history. It just didn't connect to the landscape. And it was the landscape that formed us, that made us who we were as we grew in it, that affected everything. We thought we were living in a fantasy landscape when actually we were living in a science fictional one. In ignorance, we played our way through what the elves and giants had left us, taking the fairies' possession for ownership. I named the dramroads after places in The Lord of the Rings when I should have recognized that they were from The Chrysalids. ~ Jo Walton

What I fear and desire most in this world is passion. I fear it because it promises to be spontaneous, out of my control, unnamed, beyond my reasonable self. I desire it because passion has color, like the landscape before me. It is not pale. It is not neutral. It reveals the backside of the heart. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

Timothy O'Sullivan was, it seems to me, the greatest of the photographers because he understood nature first as architecture. ~ Robert Adams

I have a burning desire to see what things look like photographed by me. ~ Garry Winogrand

To be ready is one thing, to be able to wait is another; but to seize the right moment is everything. ~ Arthur Schnitzler

I knew even then that she was right. An en is a karmic bond lasting a lifetime. Nowadays many people seem to believe their lives are entirely a matter of choice; but in my day we viewed ourselves as pieces of clay that forever show the fingerprints of everyone who has touched them. Nobu's touch had made a deeper impression on me than most. No one could tell me whether he would be my ultimate destiny, but I had always sensed the en between us. Somewhere in the landscape of my life Nobu would always be present. But could it really be that of all the lessons I'd learned, the hardest one lay just ahead of me? Would I really have to take each of my hopes and put them away where no one would ever see them again, where not even I would ever see them? ~ Arthur Golden

The denunciation of suffering by photography has replaced the religious justification of suffering in painting. Denunciation is a function of photojournalism, and in itself that's a step in the right direction. ~ Luc Delahaye

I believe photography is a tool to express our positive assessment of the world. A tool to acquire ultimate happiness and belief. ~ Ansel Adams

With my wedding photography business, I want repeat customers. So hooray for divorce! That's why I take lots of pictures - of cheating spouses. ~ Jarod Kintz

A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about. ~ Richard Avedon

Landscape planners will have the opportunity to make sculptured roofscapes, so that cities appear to be verdant hills and valleys. Streets will become shady routes carved through the undergrowth. Roofs will become mountain tops. People will become ants. ~ Tom Turner

Over the years I have photographed thousands of people. I have never stopped being curious and trying to discover new worlds. I have used my camera as a mirror for my subjects as well. I remember photographing a woman in her 80s for my book, Wise Women, who told me it had been a long time since anyone had really been interested in "seeing" or photographing her. When she saw the picture, she burst into tears. She saw something in the photograph, an inner beauty and soul, she felt had long ago vanished. ~ Joyce Tenneson

Grain is the brush stroke of photography. ~ Constantine Manos

Victor Faust did much more than help me escape a life of abuse and servitude. He changed me.
He changed the landscape of my dreams, the dreams I had every day about living ordinarily and free
and on my own. He changed the colors on the palette from primary to rainbow - as dark as the colors
of that rainbow may be. ~ J.A. Redmerski

I'm an African woman, I suppose these thoughts torture me more than they do black American people, because it's like watching my own children trapped in a car that's sinking to the bottom of a lake and being impotent to save them'the black Americans have their own holocaust going on. You see the black man erasing black children from the landscape, you see black women desperately trying to get the black man's attention by wearing blonde hair and fake blue eyes, 500 years after he sold her and their children across the ocean. ~ Kola Boof

One knows that frontal and/or profile photography is torn to pieces ... Inversely, what remains of the photograph must be seen as a fragment coming to fill a gap in the drawing. ~ Jean Francois Lyotard

Becoming emancipated at 14, my life wasn't normal. I didn't have to go to school, so I didn't. I was rebellious by nature. I spent my 20s focusing on my company, Flower Films, and producing movies. Now that I'm almost 30, I would like to try other things in lie. I'm crazy about photography, and I want to take an art history class. ~ Drew Barrymore

...where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one's taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person's love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term "generosity of spirit" applied to nothing, was a cliche, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire - meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in... this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged... ~ Bret Easton Ellis

Seen from above, landscapes are made up of mountains and watercourses. Just as a transparent model of the human body consists of a framework of bone and a network of arteries, the earth's crust is structured in mountain ridges, river, creeks, and gullies. ~ Reinhold Messner

By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is. ~ Susan Sontag

I am neither an economist nor a photographer of monuments, and I am not much of a journalist either. What I am trying to do more than anything else is to observe life. ~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

I was a dog groomer. I delivered radiators; I was a photography producer. I typed classified ads for many years. It was my longest term job - years of typing classified ads while I was in bands. ~ Janet Weiss

Am I in the picture? Am I getting in or out of it? I could be a ghost, an animal or a dead body, not just this girl standing on the corner ... ? ~ Francesca Woodman

A career in photography is a journey without a destination. ~ Joe McNally

There's this way that photography is always about going out searching. I'm not the kind of a photographer who can photograph my home. ~ Justine Kurland

What was it like then to witness the transformation wrought by this construction? A geometric idea of precision suddenly imposed on a landscape, lived on and in for centuries. The land itself like a body submitted to military discipline. Or like a mind, tutored along certain acceptable pathways, so that finally all that lies outside certain avenues of thought begins to assume an air of unreality.
The land of course is still there. Only now it has receded into the background. It is what you see in your peripheral vision as you speed down the highway. The complexity of it, the intricate presence of it, has been reduced now to a single word, jungle. If once you breathed its breath or slept surrounded by its dark or wakened with its light, you no longer remember. You tell yourself life has improved. The jungle is in the past. To enter it is to stray from the path, or to be pulled down into some unknown depth. It is an exotic place, intriguing but also unpredictable, uncontrolled, threatening the well-paved order of existence. ~ Susan Griffin

I mean, certainly writing, painting, photography, dance, architecture, there is an aspect of almost every art form that is useful and that merges into film in some way. ~ Sydney Pollack

I find that in the process of making a film you're constantly discovering things that you never even imagined would work at the beginning. Actors come into the film and do things you never even imagined. Production designers come in, the director of photography lights it in a way that you never imagined. So, it's always evolving, always exciting. ~ Peter Jackson

Of course, it may be that the arts of writing and photography are antithetical. The hope and aim of a word-handler is that he maycommunicate a thought or an impression to his reader without the reader's realizing that he has been dragged through a series of hazardous or grotesque syntactical situations. In photography the goal seems to be to prove beyond a doubt that the cameraman, in his great moment of creation, was either hanging by his heels from the rafters or was wedged under the floor with his lens in a knothole. ~ E.B. White

I don't even like photography at all. I'm just doing photography until I can do something better. ~ Nan Goldin

The people I work with, the people I photograph, become a kind of family for me. ~ Joyce Tenneson

To me, the magic of photography, per se, is that you can capture an instant of a second that couldn't exist before and couldn't exist after. It's almost like a cowboy that draws his gun. You draw a second before or after, you miss and you're dead - not them. To me, photography's always like that. ~ Mario Testino

They are quiet for a long time. "Do you remember the time you told me you were afraid that you were a series of nasty surprises for me?" he asks him, and Jude nods, slightly. "You aren't," he tells him. "You aren't. But being with you is like being in this fantastic landscape," he continues, slowly. "You think it's one thing, a forest, and then suddenly it changes, and it's a meadow, or a jungle, or cliffs of ice. And they're all beautiful, but they're strange as well, and you don't have a map, and you don't understand how you got from one terrain to the next so abruptly, and you don't know when the next transition will arrive, and you don't have any of the equipment you need. And so you keep walking through, and trying to adjust as you go, but you don't really know what you're doing, and often you make mistakes, bad mistakes. That's sometimes what it feels like." They're silent. "So basically," Jude says at last, "basically, you're saying I'm New Zealand. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

Stillness fell upon them, as weighty as a promise. The two of them walked in silence, along the still,

moonlit landscape, and through the drowsing trees. ~ Debotri Dhar

The subject, the thing itself, is the genesis of all types of photography. ~ Bill Jay

Take a trip to the exotic landscape of your lover's body. ~ Alexandra Katehakis

If you look at most photography, especially the pictures that grab you, they are not objective at all. Sometimes gut wrenching and sometimes lovely, but the moment someone decides to release the shutter, it is an editorial statement. ~ John Filo

The soul of alpinism is to travel light and fast through a dangerous landscape in pursuit of a personal star. That is ascent. ~ Gregory Crouch

There's no musical landscape to poetry. It has somewhat of a higher standard than songs, I think. ~ J. D. Souther