Edward Weston Quotes

45 Sourced Quotes

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

Edward Weston
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.

Edward Weston
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.

Edward Weston
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.

Edward Weston
Everything in the West is on a grander scale, more intense, vital, dramatic.

Edward Weston
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.

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

Edward Weston
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.

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

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

Edward Weston
"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"."

Edward Weston
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.

Edward Weston
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.

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

Edward Weston
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.

Edward Weston