quoted from Edwin Land who invented Polaroid photography

“I find it is very important to work intensively for long hours when I am beginning to see solutions to a problem. At such times atavistic competences seem to come welling up. You are handling so many variables at a barely conscious level that you can’t afford to be interrupted. If you are, it may take a year to cover the same ground you could otherwise cover in sixty hours.”

quoted from Ansel Adams from a letter written to his friend Cedric Wright June 10, 1937

“A strange thing happened to me today. I saw a big thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me; things that relate to those who are loved and those who are real friends.

For the first time, I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.

Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone; the resonance of all spiritual and physical things.

Friendship is another form of love – more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and acceptance of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality.

Art is both love and friendship and understanding; the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of things. It is more than kindness, which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light of the inner folds of awareness of the spirit. It is a recreation on an other plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and all interrelations of these.”