Edward Weston Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So called "composition" becomes a personal thing, to be developed along with technique, as a personal way of seeing.

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

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

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

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

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

I see no reason for recording the obvious.

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

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.

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

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

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

No photographer is better than the simplest of cameras

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good composition is merely the strongest way of seeing.

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