Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.
Ansel AdamsRead
The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The photograph's negative is like the score of music, while the final print is the performance, each unique in its expression.
Ansel Adams' quote draws an analogy between the photographic process and musical performance. The negative represents the original vision or potential of a photograph, akin to a composer's written score. The final print, like a live performance, showcases the artistic interpretation and subtleties that arise from the negative, emphasizing that every execution of an idea can yield different and unique results.
Themes
PhotographyArtPerformanceCreativityNegativeExpression
In practice
Example use cases
In a workshop about photography, one might quote Ansel Adams to illustrate the importance of both the negative and print.
More from Ansel Adams
All quotes βIt is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.
Ansel AdamsRead
A good photograph is knowing where to stand.
Ansel AdamsRead
With all art expression, when something is seen, it is a vivid experience, sudden, compelling, and inevitable.
Ansel AdamsRead
The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster.
Ansel AdamsRead
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 AdamsRead
Similar quotes
Silence... is the essence of the music itself, the vital ingredient that makes it possible for the music to exist at all.
Alfred BrendelRead
Listen to the great guitarists of the Fifties. They didn't do that nasty sort of industrial distortion. They played musical compositions as solos - Scotty Moore, Cliff Gallup, Django Reinhardt. There wasn't a bad note in any of those solos. I listened to that and stayed with those rules.
Jeff BeckRead
I sometimes have a horrible fear of turning up a canvas of mine. I'm always afraid of finding a monster in place of the precious jewels I thought I had put there!
Camille PissarroRead
with poems one accomplishes so little when one writes them early. One should hold off and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, a long life if possible, and then, right at the end, one could perhaps write ten lines that are good.
Rainer Maria RilkeRead
I love a ballad in print o' life, for then we are sure they are true.
William ShakespeareRead
One writes such a story [The Lord of the Rings] not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mold of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much personal selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one's personal compost-heap; and my mold is evidently made largely of linguistic matter.
J. R. R. TolkienRead