American Landscape Quotes

The first supermarket supposedly appeared on the American landscape in 1946. That is not very long ago. Until then, where was all the food? Dear folks, the food was in homes, gardens, local fields, and forests. It was near kitchens, near tables, near bedsides. It was in the pantry, the cellar, the backyard.

I’m interested in using the iconography of nature and the American landscape as surrogates or metaphors for psychological anxiety, fear or desire

At one with the power of the American landscape, and renowned for the patient skill and timeless beauty of his work, photographer Ansel Adams has been visionary in his efforts to preserve this country's wild and scenic areas, both in film and on Earth. Drawn to the beauty of nature's monuments, he is regarded by environmentalists as a monument himself, and by photographers as a national institution. It is through his foresight and fortitude that so much of America has been saved for future Americans.

I have been using the art of photography to research the ways in which the pictorial strategies of the Nineteenth Century color the way in which the American landscape is apprehended by today's viewers.

One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set it. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again.

...but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing.

The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.

My pictures must first be beautiful, but that beauty is not enough. I strive to convey an underlying edge of anxiety, of isolation, of fear.

Any landscape is a condition of the spirit.

Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.

It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.

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

A good photograph is knowing where to stand.

Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.

The American Indian is of the soil, whether it be the region of forests, plains, pueblos, or mesas. He fits into the landscape, for the hand that fashioned the continent also fashioned the man for his surroundings. He once grew as naturally as the wild sunflowers, he belongs just as the buffalo belonged.

Edgar Wayburn has worked to preserve the most breath-taking examples of the American landscape. In fact, over the course of more than a half-century, both as President of the Sierra Club and as a private citizen, he has saved more of our wilderness than any person alive.

There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.

There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.

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

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

The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it!

The Place of Religion in Chicago is a clearly written account of a little-studied aspect of American landscape. Based on unique field surveys and supported by photographs, tables, and beautifully crafted maps, the book will form a lasting contribution to our understanding of an overlooked element of the American urban scene: the religious landscape of a major metropolis.