Edward Weston Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I see no reason for recording the obvious.

...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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Good composition is merely the strongest way of seeing.

...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.

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

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

No photographer is better than the simplest of cameras

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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