Edward Weston Quotations

I see no reason for recording the obvious.

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.

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

Anything that excites me for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual.

There is nothing like a Bach fugue to remove me from a discordant moment... only Bach hold up fresh and strong after repeated playing. I can always return to Bach when the other records weary me.

Now, to consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravity before going for a walk.

My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea, even switch me to different subject matter. So I start out with my mind as free from image as the silver film on which I am to record, and I hope as sensitive.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Results alone should be appraised; the way in which these are achieved is of importance only to the maker.

Dare to be irrational! - keep free from formulas, open to any fresh impulse, fluid.

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.

I have been photographing our toilet, that glossy enameled receptacle of extraordinary beauty. Here was every sensuous curve of the human figure divine but minus the imperfections. Never did the Greeks reach a more significant consummation to their culture, and it somehow reminded me, in the glory of its chaste convulsions and in its swelling, sweeping, forward movement of finely progressing contours, of the Victory of Samothrace.

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...

As great a picture can be made as one's mental capacity-no greater. Art cannot be taught; it must be self-inspiration, though the imagination may be fired and the ambition and work directed by the advice and example of others.

The creative force in man recognizes and records these rhythms with the medium most suitable to him, the object, or the moment, feeling the cause, the life within the outer form. Recording unfelt facts, acquired by rule, results in sterile inventory. To see the Thing Itself is essential: the quintessence revealed direct without the fog of impressionism - the casual noting of the superficial phase, a transitory mood.

People who wouldn't think of taking a sieve to the well to draw water fail to see the folly in taking a camera to make a painting.

"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"."

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.

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

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

Photography, not soft gutless painting, is best equipped to bore into the spirit of today.

It's hard not to tell the truth with a camera. Artists are particularly good at that.

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.

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.

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

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

My work is never intellectual. I never make a negative unless emotionally moved by my subject.

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

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

I am not limiting myself to theories, so I never question the rightness to my approach.

I find myself every so often looking at my ground glass as though the unrecorded image might escape me!

...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.

In common with other artists the photographer wants his finished print to convey to others his own response to his subject. In the fulfillment of this aim, his greatest asset is the directness of the process he employs. But this advantage can only be retained if he simplifies his equipment and technic to the minimum necessary, and keeps his approach from from all formula, art-dogma, rules and taboos. Only then can he be free to put his photographic sight to use in discovering and revealing the nature of the world he lives in.

Good composition is merely the strongest way of seeing.

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.

One does not think during creative work, any more than one thinks when driving a car. But one has a background of years - learning, unlearning, success, failure, dreaming, thinking, experience, all this - then the moment of creation, the focusing of all into the moment. So I can make without thought, fifteen carefully considered negatives, one every fifteen minutes, given material with as many possibilities. But there is all the eyes have seen in this life to influence me.

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

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

Is love like art - something always ahead, never quite attained.

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

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.

The photographer's most important and likewise most difficult task is not learning to manage his camera, or to develop, or to print. It is learning to see photographically — that is, learning to see his subject matter in terms of the capacities of his tools and processes, so that he can instantaneously translate the elements and values in a scene before him into the photograph he wants to make.

I want the stark beauty that a lens can so exactly render presented without interference of artistic effect.

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

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

The photograph isolates and perpetuates a moment of time: an important and revealing moment, or an unimportant and meaningless one, depending upon the photographer's understanding of his subject and mastery of his process.

Why limit yourself to what your eyes see when you have an opportunity to extend your vision?

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

The... arguments against photography ever being considered a fine art are: the element of chance which enters in, finding things ready-made for a machine to record, and of course the mechanics of the medium. ...I say that chance enters into all branches of art: a chance word or phrase starts a new trend of thought in a writer, a chance sound may bring a new melody to a musician, a chance combination of lines, new composition to a painter. ...Chance - which in reality is not chance - but being ready, attuned to one's surroundings - and grasp my opportunity....

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.

......so called “composition” becomes a personal thing, to be developed along with technique, as a personal way of seeing.

...the pepper is beginning to show signs of strain, and tonight should grace a salad. It has been suggested that I am a cannibal to eat my models.

This then: to photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock.

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

The prejudice many photographers have against colour photography comes from not thinking of colour as form. You can say things with colour that can't be said in black and white... Those who say that colour will eventually replace black and white are talking nonsense. The two do not compete with each other. They are different means to different ends.

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.

For photography is a way to capture the moment - not just any moment, but the important one, this one moment out of all time when your subject is revealed to the fullest - that moment of perfection which comes once and is not repeated.

The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?

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.

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

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