I found that while the camera does not express the soul, perhaps a photograph can! - Ansel Adams Some photographers take reality... and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation. - Ansel Adams Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter. - Ansel Adams There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept. - Ansel Adams [www]

Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes. - Henri Cartier-Bresson Think about the photo before and after, never during. The secret is to take your time. You mustn't go too fast. The subject must forget about you. Then, however, you must be very quick. - Henri Cartier-Bresson To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

To take photographs means to recognise - simultaneously and within a fraction of a second - both the fact itself and the rigorous organisation of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

An original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an originals motivated be necessity. It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms. To create is divine, to reproduce is human. - Man Ray We know to what lies an entirely aesthetic preoccupation can lead ‘beauty’ and ‘morality’, to the point where the length of the beard is taken as an index of intellectual strength and virility. Only complete contempt for all formulas, aesthetic or timorous, joined to a total familiarity with the craft, can serve a new social condition and show its worth. - Man Ray Perhaps someday photography – if we allow it – will show us what painting has already shown us, our true portrait, and will give to the spirit of revolt that exists in every truly living, sensitive being, a plastic and enduring voice of its own. - Man Ray Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask 'how', while others of a more curious nature will ask 'why'. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information. - Man Ray