Galen Rowell Quotes

My big dream was to work as a photographer for 'National Geographic.'

I grew up looking at National Geographic. I always wondered who was taking the photos and how.

Black-and-white photography, which I was doing in the very early days, was essentially called art photography and usually consisted of landscapes by people like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. But photographs by people like Adams didn't interest me.

I have always been a very keen walker, though, and I often took a camera with me on my walks.

'The Gardener' is more than a marvellous collection of images by a master photographer.

I began taking pictures in the natural world to be able to show people what I was experiencing when I climbed and explored in Yosemite in the High Sierra.

I'm a big fan of 'National Geographic', the magazine and the channel. Anything to do with the natural world. For years, when I was younger, I was convinced I would be a nature photographer, but that didn't pan out.

Only the picture matters. It's what goes on the screen that counts.

On some level, you could say you wouldn't have 'In Style Magazine' at all had Anna Wintour not decided to put celebrities on the cover of 'Vogue' from her earliest years as Editor in Chief.

Fog is my weakness, and every time there is low fog, I am out and about with my camera.

Timothy O'Sullivan was, it seems to me, the greatest of the photographers because he understood nature first as architecture.

There's always the temptation, as a cinematographer, to make the shot look as perfect as possible.

I do think image is important in a band, because when I go see a show, I want to see a show; I don't want to just listen to the music.

Even when political reporting is not reduced to personality, political photography is. An article might offer depth and complexity, but is illustrated with a photo of one of the 10 politicians whose picture must be attached to every news story.

I think photography has made us see the landscape in a very dull way - that's one of its effects. It's not spatial.

I'd known the people at Rolling Stone for a while. I'd gone to them with a piece I'd done on Beirut for Vanity Fair that Vanity Fair didn't want to publish, because they said I was making fun of death... This was Tina Brown.But they paid me for it. So I've got this big chunk of a piece, and Rolling Stone liked it, but they thought it was a little dated. But then they called me back and asked me to do a similar piece about the Turks and Caicos Islands, where the whole government had been arrested for dope smuggling. That was fun.

... nature photographs downright bore me for some reason or other. I think: 'Oh, yes. Look at that sand dune. What of it?'

From the moment that photography appeared, the descriptive genre began to invade Letters... In verse as in prose the décor and exterior aspects of life took an almost excessive place.

The digital process gives me total control over how I want the film to look. The films look like they did when I was first looking through the viewfinder.

My interest in photography did not begin with books or mentors, or with any burning desire to see the world through a camera. It evolved from an intense devotion to mountains and wilderness that eventually shaped all the parts of my life and brought them together.

On TV you can't show landscapes. You just can't. Even a postcard is better.

Actually, documentary pictures include every subject in the world - good, bad, indifferent. I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.

In 1850, August Salzmann photographed, near Jerusalem, the road to Beith-Lehem (as it was spelled at the time): nothing but stony ground, olive trees; but three tenses dizzy my consciousness: my present, the time of Jesus, and that of the photographer, all this under the instance of 'reality' - and no longer through the elaborations of the text, whether fictional or poetic, which itself is never credible down to the root.

No one can improve on nature's landscapes. I feel I've hit the mark when I've captured a balance between mood, look, and feel... when viewers say they sense the desert heat, or the chill of a mountain snowfall.

An object never serves the same function as its image - or its name.