Edward Weston
[Photographer, b. 1886, Highland Park, Illinois, d. 1958, Wildcat Hill, California.]
Since it has the validity of a new expression, without traditions or conventions, the freshness of an experimental epoch, the strength of pioneering, photography has a significant status in the life of today.
(1928) 
The appeal to our emotions... is largely due to the quality of authenticity in the photograph. The spectator accepts its authority and, in viewing it, perforce believes he would have seen that scene or object exactly so if he had been there.
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, forward movement of finely progressing contours, of the Victory of Samothrace.
Any predictions that color will supplant black and white are ridiculous; drawings, dry points, etchings, lithographs are not negated by painting. The aesthetic possibilities of color will be determined by the creative ability of the individual.
(1947)
Very often people looking at my pictures say, “You must have had to wait a long time to get that cloud just right (or that shadow, or the light).” As a matter of fact, I almost never wait, that is, unless I can see that the thing will be right in a few minutes. But if I must wait an hour for the shadow to move, or the light to change, or the cow to graze in the other direction, then I put up my camera and go on, knowing that I am likely to find three subjects just as good in the same hour.
It seems so utterly naive that landscape—not that of the pictorial school—is not considered of “social significance” when it has a far more important bearing on the human race of a given locale than excrescences called cities.
Those who feel nothing, or not completely at the
time of exposure, relying upon subsequent manipulation to reach an unpremeditated end, are predestined to failure.
Photography’s great difficulty lies in the necessary coincidence of the sitter’s revealment, the photographer’s realization, the camera’s readiness. But when these elements do coincide, portraits in any other medium, sculpture or painting, are cold dead things in comparison.
