When you look at a good Ansel Adams photograph, you think you know the temperature, the relative humidity, the month.

I’ve always been better at photographing things I like than things I don’t like,

I was very young and very stupid. In the beginning it’s mostly just the magic of the process. It’s not easy. You don’t learn overnight.

He photographed not so much geography as weather.

Mr. Anderson and Son,

I was very young and very stupid,

People don’t think of landscapes as moving, but they do. The light changes, the clouds move, and that’s what Adams’ photography is really about — about the fact that nature is not permanent.

There is a terrible truthfulness about photography. The ordinary academician gets hold of a pretty model, paints her as well as he can, calls her Juliet, and puts a nice verse Shakespeare underneath, and the...