EX 132 Inspired by words
This weeks exercise revolves around words and ideas. Stopping to think about someone else’s words and allowing some inspiration to come to you from them is an amazing experience.
Ansel Adams is known for his iconic photographs, and his quotes are often thrown around as gospel. There are so man interesting ideas that come from them. They are worth exploring in their own right.
I was going to call this exercise Ansel Inspired. I don’t want you to turn to his artworks for inspiration but to his words and ideas. Read through all of the quotes by Ansel Adams bellow, and pick one. Then use that for your inspiration for you photographs. Play with it. See where it takes you.
When you post your three photographs, please include the one quote that inspired them all.
Inspiring quotes by Ansel Adams:
1. “Ask yourself: “Does this subject move me to feel, think and dream?”
2. “A photograph is usually looked at – seldom looked into.”
3. “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”
4. “Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.”
5. “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”
6. “There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.”
7. “There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.”
8. “It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.”
9. “Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.”
10. “The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance.”
11. “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.”
-Ansel Adams
12. “No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.”
13. “A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.”
14. “Sometimes I arrive just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter.”
15. “Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment.”
16. “In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.”
17. “Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.”
18. “It is my intention to present - through the medium of photography - intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators.”
19. “Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.”
20. “Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.”
21. “Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space.”
22. “I have often had a retrospective vision where everything in my past life seems to fall with significance into logical sequence.”
23. “There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.”
24. “The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it!”
25. “Don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.”
26. “A good photograph is knowing where to stand.”
27. “A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.”
28. “When I’m ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my minds eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I’m interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.”
29. “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.”
30. “In a strict sense photography can never be abstract, for the camera is incapable of synthetic integration.”
31. “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.”
32. “Impression is not enough. Design, style, technique - these, too, are not enough. Art must reach further than impression or self-revelation.”
33. “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.”
34. “How high your awareness level is determines how much meaning you get from your world. Photography can teach you to improve your awareness level.”
35. “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.”
36. “…one sees differently with color photography than black-and-white… in short, visualization must be modified by the specific nature of the equipment and materials being used.”
37. “Notebook. No photographer should be without one.”
38. “The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.”
39. “To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces.”
40. “Let us leave a splendid legacy for our children...let us turn to them and say, this you inherit: guard it well, for it is far more precious than money...and once destroyed, nature's beauty cannot be repurchased at any price.”
41. “I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful - an endless prospect of magic and wonder.”
42. “Bad weather makes for good photography.”
43. “I believe in beauty. I believe in stones and water, air and soil, people and their future and their fate.”
44. “We all move on the fringes of eternity and are sometimes granted vistas through fabric of illusion. Many refuse to admit it: I feel a mystery exists. There are certain times, when, as on the whisper of the wind, there comes a clear and quiet realization that there is indeed a presence in the world, a nonhuman entity that is not necessarily inhuman.”
45. “I never know in advance what I will photograph… I go out into the world and hope I will come across something that imperatively interests me. I am addicted to the found object. I have no doubt that I will continue to make photographs till my last breath.”
46. “Today, we must realize that nature is revealed in the simplest meadow, wood lot, marsh, stream, or tidepool, as well as in the remote grandeur of our parks and wilderness areas.”
47. “No matter how sophisticated you may be, a large granite mountain cannot be denied – it speaks in silence to the very core of your being.”
48. “Both the grand and the intimate aspects of nature can be revealed in the expressive photograph. Both can stir enduring affirmations and discoveries, and can surely help the spectator in his search for identification with the vast world of natural beauty and wonder surrounding him.”
49. “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.”
50. “In my mind's eye, I visualize how a particular...Sight and feeling will appear on a print. If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice.”
51. “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!”
