Quotes by John Szarkowski

“People dont think of landscapes as moving, but they do. The light changes, the clouds move, and thats what Adams photography is really about -- about the fact that nature is not permanent.”

“Ive always been better at photographing things I like than things I dont like,”

“When you look at a good Ansel Adams photograph, you think you know the temperature, the relative humidity, the month.”

“He photographed not so much geography as weather.”

“Mr. Anderson and Son,”

“I was very young and very stupid,”

“I was very young and very stupid. In the beginning its mostly just the magic of the process. Its not easy. You dont learn overnight.”

There is a terrible truthfulness about photography. The ordinary academician gets hold of a pretty model, paints her as well as he can, calls her Juliet, and puts a nice verse Shakespeare underneath, and the picture is admired beyond measure. The photographer finds the same pretty girl, he dresses her up and photographs her, and calls her Juliet, but somehow it is no good – it is still Miss Wilkins, the model. It is too true to be Juliet.George Bernard ShawWilson’s Photographic Magazine, LVI, 1909

“All photographs are time exposures, of shorter or longer duration, and each describes a discrete parcel of time.”