Edward Weston Quotes - Page 3

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

...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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

"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"."

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

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.

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.