Galen Rowell Quotes

• 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.

  Galen Rowell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Like, Feel

• I’m exchanging molecules every 30 days with the natural world and in a spiritual sense I know I am a part of it and take my photographs from that emotional feeling within me, rather than from an emotional distance as a spectator.

  Galen Rowell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in World, Natural

• I remember when an editor at the National Geographic promised to run about a dozen of my landscape pictures from a story on the John Muir trail as an essay, but when the group of editors got together, someone said that my pictures looked like postcards.

  Galen Rowell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Promised, Remember

• And most of my early pictures failed but about one in a 100 somehow looked better than what I saw.

  Galen Rowell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Failed

• Ever since the 1860s when photographers travelled the American West and brought photographs of scenic wonders back to the people on the East Coast of America we have had a North American tradition of landscape photography used for the environment.

  Galen Rowell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Travel

• 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.

  Galen Rowell

  Topics in Mistake

• I almost never set out to photograph a landscape, nor do I think of my camera as a means of recording a mountain or an animal unless I absolutely need a ‘record shot’. My first thought is always of light.

  Galen Rowell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Photograph

• 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.

  Galen Rowell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Participant

• A lot of people think that when you have grand scenery, such as you have in Yosemite, that photography must be easy.

  Galen Rowell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People, Thinking, Photography

• 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.

  Galen Rowell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Cognitive, Scientists

• I began to realise that film sees the world differently than the human eye, and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed.

  Galen Rowell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Powerful, Photographs

• I think landscape photography in general is somewhat undervalued.

  Galen Rowell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Landscape, Photography

• 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.

  Galen Rowell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in World, Natural, Experiencing, Photography

• I find it some of the hardest photography and the most challenging photography I’ve ever done. It’s a real challenge to work with the natural features and the natural light.

  Galen Rowell

  Topics in Work

  Tags in Photography, Challenging

• If we limit our vision to the real world, we will forever be fighting on the minus side of things, working only too make our photographs equal to what we see out there, but no better.

  Galen Rowell

  Topics in Vision

  Tags in Photographers, World

• 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.

  Galen Rowell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Photographs, Communication

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

  Galen Rowell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Photography, Environmental, Movement

• The reason that I keep writing is that all my most powerful messages about the fates of wild places that I care about need to have words as well as images.

  Galen Rowell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Powerful, Messages, Places

• Luckily, many other people tell me how they have had a particular landscape photograph of mine in their office or bedroom for 15 years and it always speaks to them strongly whenever they see it.

  Galen Rowell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Photographer, Photography

• 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.

  Galen Rowell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Powerful, Personality

Galen Rowell (26)

Birth:	23rd August, 1940
Death:	11th August, 2002
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Photographer

About

Galen Avery Rowell was born in Oakland, California, USA. He was an American wilderness photographer,climber, writer, and mountaineer. For the next 52 years, he climbed mountains and explored the wilderness. He won the Ansel Adams Award for Conservation Photography in 1984. He had numerous photographic assignments for Life, National Geographic, Outdoor Photographer, and various other publications. He was also a highly regarded writer on subjects ranging from photography, humanitarian and environmental issues, human visual cognition, and mountaineering, publishing numerous magazine articles and eighteen books in his lifetime. He wrote several books include: Galen Rowell's Inner Game of Outdoor Photography, Galen Rowell: A Retrospective, AAA's North America the Beautiful, Galen Rowell's Vision, Mountains of the Middle Kingdom, and In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods.

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