Galen Rowell Quotes

• When we tune in to an especially human way of viewing the landscape powerfully, it resonates with an audience.

  Galen Rowell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Audience

• 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

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

  Galen Rowell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Mountain, Photography

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

  Galen Rowell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Self, Careful, Specific, Location

• These days, most nature photographers are deeply committed to the environmental message.

  Galen Rowell

  Topics in Nature

  Tags in Photographers

• 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

• 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

• 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.

  Galen Rowell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Self, Career, Photographer

• 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

• My mountaineering skills are not important to my best photographs, but they do add a component to my work that is definitely a bit different than that of most photographers.

  Galen Rowell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Photographers, Skills

• 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

• 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

• 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 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 think landscape photography in general is somewhat undervalued.

  Galen Rowell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Landscape, Photography

• 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

• 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 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

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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