The reason that he is as important to us as I think he is is because he was a good artist, and on his best days he was a terrific artist, and he found some way to put together those little fragments of the world in a way that transformed them into a picture. In the same way that, you know, a poet uses the same dictionaries that the rest of us do. All the words are in there ... all the words in the poem are there, they're in alphabetical order so you can find them ... and it's just a matter of taking a few of them and putting them in the right order, and that's all there is to it. And so why is it that some lines of poetry, some sentences grasp us, you know, grip us, and we think, "That's, that's right, that's true, whatever, I don't know quite what that means, but whatever it means it's true." And a good picture does something like that ... the best of Ansel's ... are part of our memory, part of our sense of what a picture might be made out of, what it might look like and what it might ultimately be about, which is the part we can't explain.
- John Szarkowski
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