Edward Weston
Edward Weston
Edward Henry Westonwas a 20th-century American photographer. He has been called "one of the most innovative and influential American photographers…" and "one of the masters of 20th century photography." Over the course of his 40-year career Weston photographed an increasingly expansive set of subjects, including landscapes, still lifes, nudes, portraits, genre scenes and even whimsical parodies. It is said that he developed a "quintessentially American, and specially Californian, approach to modern photography" because of his focus on the people and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhotographer
Date of Birth24 March 1888
CityHighland Park, IL
CountryUnited States of America
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.
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.
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.
I see my finished platinum print (in the viewfinder) in all its desired qualities, before my exposure.
To compose a subject well means no more than to see and present it in the strongest manner possible.
I want the stark beauty that a lens can so exactly render presented without interference of artistic effect.
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.
My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, or the camera's eye may entirely change my idea.
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.
Dare to be irrational! - keep free from formulas, open to any fresh impulse, fluid.
Clouds, torsos, shells, peppers, trees, rocks, smoke stacks, are but interdependent, interrelated parts of a whole, which is life.
My true program is summed up in one word: life. I expect to photograph anything suggested by that word which appeals to me.
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....