Edward Weston Quotes

Modern Art is being used to index me. Surely it was a source but photographers have influenced Modern Art quite as deeply as they have been influenced, maybe more. Anyway painters don't have a copyright on M. A. We were all born in the same upheaval.

Very often people looking at my pictures say, 'You must have had to wait a long time to get that cloud just right (or that shadow, or the light).' As a matter of fact, I almost never wait, that is, unless I can see that the thing will be right in a few minutes. But if I must wait an hour for the shadow to move, or the light to change, or the cow to graze in the other direction, then I put up my camera and go on, knowing that I am likely to find three subjects just as good in the same hour.

I would say to any artist: Don't be repressed in your work, dare to experiment, consider any urge, if in a new direction all the better.

To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk.

A new love came into my life, a most beautiful one, one which will, I believe, stand the test of time ... Perhaps C. will be remembered as the great love of my life. Already I have achieved certain heights reached with no other love.

Now to consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk. Such rules and laws are deduced from the accomplished fact; they are the products of reflection.

The painters have no copyright on modern art! ... I believe in, and make no apologies for, photography: it is the most important graphic medium of our day. It does not have to be, indeed cannot be - compared to painting - it has different means and aims.

If I have any 'message' worth giving to a beginner it is that there are no short cuts in photography.

I was extravagant in the matter of cameras - anything photographic - I had to have the best. But that was to further my work. In most things I have gone along with the plainest - or without.

The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.

I don't care if you make a print on a bath mat, just as long as it is a good print.

Through this photographic eye you will be able to look out on a new light-world, a world for the most part uncharted and unexplored, a world that lies waiting to be discovered and revealed.

Art is based on order. The world is full of 'sloppy Bohemians' and their work betrays them.

An excellent conception can be quite obscured by faulty technical execution or clarified by faultless technique.

To see the Thing itself is essential: the quintessence revealed direct without the fog of impressionism ... This then: to photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock. Significant presentation - not interpretation.

To compose a subject well means no more than to see and present it in the strongest manner possible.

Restricting too personal, and therefore prejudiced, interpretation leads to revolution - the fusion of an inner and outer reality derived from the wholeness of life - sublimating things seen into things known.

My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea.

It seems so utterly naive that landscape - not that of the pictorial school - is not considered of "social significance" when it has a far more important bearing on the human race of a given locale than excrescences called cities.

For the obvious reason that nature - unadulterated and unimproved by man - is simply chaos. In fact, the camera proves that nature is crude and lacking in arrangement ...

A photograph has no value unless it looks exactly like a photograph and nothing else.

Photography suits the temper of this age - of active bodies and minds. It is a perfect medium for one whose mind is teeming with ideas, imagery, for a prolific worker who would be slowed down by painting or sculpting, for one who sees quickly and acts decisively, accurately.

Photography to the amateur is recreation, to the professional it is work, and hard work too, no matter how pleasurable it my be.

Ultimately success or failure in photographing people depends on the photographer's ability to understand his fellow man.

When money enters in - then, for a price, I become a liar - and a good one I can be whether with pencil or subtle lighting or viewpoint. I hate it all, but so do I support not only my family, but my own work.

When a photographer masters the tools and processes of the art, then the quality of the work is only limited by his creative vision.

I start with no preconceived idea - discovery excites me to focus - then rediscovery through the lens - final form of presentation seen on ground glass, the finished print previsioned completely in every detail of texture, movement, proportion, before exposure - the shutter's release automatically and finally fixes my conception, allowing no after manipulation - the ultimate end, the print, is but a duplication of all that I saw and felt through my camera.

No photographer is better than the simplest of cameras

I always work better when I do not reason, when no question of right or wrong enter in,-when my pulse quickens to the form before me without hesitation nor calculation.

Anything more than 500 yards from the car just isn't photogenic.

I see my finished platinum print (in the viewfinder) in all its desired qualities, before my exposure.

The great scientist dares to differ from accepted 'facts' - think irrationally - let the artist do likewise.

Consulting the rules of composition before taking a photograph, is like consulting the laws of gravity before going for a walk.

If I am interested, amazed, stimulated to work, that is sufficient reason to thank the gods, and go ahead!

A lifetime can well be spent correcting and improving one's own faults without bothering about others.

My true program is summed up in one word: life. I expect to photograph anything suggested by that word which appeals to me.

"Only with effort can the camera be forced to lie: basically it is an honest medium: so the photographer is much more likely to approach nature in a spirit of inquiry, of communion, instead of with the saucy swagger of self-dubbed "artists"."

Since the recording process is instantaneous, and the nature of the image such that it cannot survive corrective handwork, it is obvious that the finished print must be created in full before the film is exposed.

It has come to me of late that comparing one man's work to another's, naming one greater or lesser, is a wrong approach.

The important and only vital question is, how much greater, finer, am I than I was yesterday? Have I fulfilled my possibilities, made the most of my potentialities?

What a marvellous world if all would, - could hold this attitude toward life.

The fact is that relatively few photographers ever master their medium. Instead they allow the medium to master them and go on an endless squirrel cage chase from new lens to new paper to new developer to new gadget, never staying with one piece of equipment long enough to learn its full capacities, becoming lost in a maze of technical information that is of little or no use since they don't know what to do with it.

Clouds, torsos, shells, peppers, trees, rocks, smoke stacks, are but interdependent, interrelated parts of a whole, which is life.

When subject matter is forced to fit into preconceived patterns, there can be no freshness of vision. Following rules of composition can only lead to a tedious repetition of pictorial cliches.