At one with the power of the American landscape, and renowned for the patient skill and timeless beauty of his work, photographer Ansel Adams has been visionary in his efforts to preserve this country's wild and scenic areas, both in film and on Earth. Drawn to the beauty of nature's monuments, he is regarded by environmentalists as a monument himself, and by photographers as a national institution. It is through his foresight and fortitude that so much of America has been saved for future Americans.
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Citation of the Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded to Ansel Adams on 9 June 1980Ansel Adams
I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.
John F. Kennedy
Whitman thought he was not abolishing beauty but generalizing it. So, for generations, did the most gifted American photographers, in their polemical pursuit of the trivial and the vulgar. But among American photographers who have matured since World War II, the Whitmanesque mandate to record in its entirety the extravagant candors of actual American experience has gone sour. In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty & beauty. You get dwarfs.
Susan Sontag
Africa will rid herself of the maniacs. Africa will live to show that "Black is beautiful". Africa is ancient but Asia is ageless. Her nimble and graceful beauty has adorned civilization from the birth of mankind. Latin America has become the castanet of an international culture that links Andalusia to Arabia and the Caribbean. What beauty there is in the tap of her flamenco! Europe is glamorous and adorable, so seductive that she is still beautiful after a number of face lifts. America has been watergated. In that flow of stagnant waters you can behold beauty in its reflection. In etherial terms the whole world is beautiful. In physical terms I have rarely seen more scenic beauty than in California or in Texas. What pains me is to see how the blind power of that most powerful society is turning that beauty into something as sinister as the portrait of Dorian Grey.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
I couldn’t portray a women in all her natural loveliness… …I haven’t the skill. No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty, the beauty that appears to me in terms of volume of line, of mass, of weight, and through that beauty interpret my subjective impression. Nature is mere a pretext for decorative composition, plus sentiment. It suggests emotion, and I translate that emotion into art. I want to express the absolute, not merely the factitious woman. (a statement given to the American 'Gelett Burgess', late in 1908, ed.)
Georges Braque
The German landscape is something unique that we cannot disturb and have no right to destroy. The more densely populated our 'living space' becomes with settlements, the greater our hunger will grow for unspoilt nature. The ever increasing spiritual damage caused by life within the big city will make this hunger practically uncontrollable... when we build here on this the landscape of our homeland we must be clear that we will protect its beauty; and in places where this beauty has already disappeared, we will reconstruct it.
Fritz Todt
Adams, Ansel
Adams, Brooks
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