Good composition is merely the strongest way of seeing.
EDWARD WESTONGood composition is merely the strongest way of seeing.
EDWARD WESTONA lifetime can well be spent correcting and improving one’s own faults without bothering about others.
EDWARD WESTONWhy limit yourself to what your eyes see when you have an opportunity to extend your vision?
EDWARD WESTONThe painters have no copyright on modern art!… I believe in, and make no apologies for, photography: it is the most important graphic medium of our day. It does not have to be, indeed cannot be – compared to painting – it has different means and aims.
EDWARD WESTONClouds, torsos, shells, peppers, trees, rocks, smoke stacks, are but interdependent, interrelated parts of a whole, which is life.
EDWARD WESTONResults alone should be appraised; the way in which these are achieved is of importance only to the maker.
EDWARD WESTONThe 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 WESTONIf I have any ‘message’ worth giving to a beginner it is that there are no short cuts in photography.
EDWARD WESTONI am not limiting myself to theories, so I never question the rightness to my approach.
EDWARD WESTONIs love like art – something always ahead, never quite attained.
EDWARD WESTONTo compose a subject well means no more than to see and present it in the strongest manner possible.
EDWARD WESTONArt is based on order. The world is full of ‘sloppy Bohemians’ and their work betrays them.
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…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.
EDWARD WESTONThe 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 WESTONMy own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera’s eye may entirely change my idea, even switch me to different subject matter. So I start out with my mind as free from image as the silver film on which I am to record, and I hope as sensitive.
EDWARD WESTON