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"I think landscape photography in general is somewhat undervalued."
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"The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing."

"I was an artistic dilettante for a while, in photography and collage and the visual arts."

"Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child."

"There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are."

"Videos are more like photography. It's not as much about trying to tell a story as it is creating images."

"What I end up shooting is the situation. I shoot the composition and my subject is going to help the composition or not."

"A woman said to me when she first sat down, You're photographing the wrong side of my face. I said, Oh, is there one?"

"A taste for simplicity cannot endure for long."

"When I was teaching at Harvard in the 1970s, I went to Project Incorporated in Cambridge and took photography classes. I didn't even know how to aim the camera in those days."
Explore more quotes by Galen Rowell

"The landscape is like being there with a powerful personality and I'm searching for just the right angles to make that portrait come across as meaningfully as possible."

"What I mean by photographing as a participant rather than observer is that I'm not only involved directly with some of the activities that I photograph, such as mountain climbing, but even when I'm not I have the philosophy that my mind and body are part of the natural world."

"One of the biggest mistakes a photographer can make is to look at the real world and cling to the vain hope that next time his film will somehow bear a closer resemblance to it."

"Today, I'm very careful not to mention very specific locations when I write or give captions."

"I think that cognitive scientists would support the view that our visual system does not directly represent what is out there in the world and that our brain constructs a lot of the imagery that we believe we are seeing."

"There's no question that photographs communicate more instantly and powerfully than words do, but if you want to communicate a complex concept clearly, you need words, too."

"The combination of pictures and words together can be really effective, and I began to realise in my career that unless I wrote my own words, then my message was diluted."

"Wanting to take a light camera with me when I climb or do mountain runs has kept me using exclusively 35 mm."

"I like to feel that all my best photographs had strong personal visions and that a photograph that doesn't have a personal vision or doesn't communicate emotion fails."

"There is no question that photography has played a major role in the environmental movement."
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