Galen Rowell

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

“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.”

“My first thought is always of light.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I think landscape photography in general is somewhat undervalued.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Today, I'm very careful not to mention very specific locations when I write or give captions.”

“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.”

“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.”

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