Quotable Artist On Photography

(Hadden, 2007)

AS I SEE straight photography, it means using the medium as itself, not as painting or theater. . . . All subject matter is open to interpretation, [and] requires the imaginative and intelligent objectivity of the person behind the camera.The realization comes from selection, aiming, shooting, processing with the best technic possible to project your comment better. . . . [Yet] technic for technic’s sake is like art for art’s sake— a phrase of artistic isolationism, a creative escapism. . . . In short, the something done by photography is communication. For what our age needs is a broad, human art, as wide as the world of human knowledge and action; photography cannot explore too far or probe too deeply to meet this need.

—Berenice Abbott (1898–1991)

THE ANSWER comes always more clearly after seeing great work of the sculptor or painter, past or present, work based on conventionalized nature, superb forms, decorative motives.That the approach to photography must be through another avenue, that 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.

—Edward Weston (1886 –1958)

THE CAMERA CAN only record what is before it, so I must await and be able to grasp the right moment when it is presented on my ground glass. In portraiture, figures, clouds—trying to record ever changing movement and expression, everything depends on my clear visions, my intuition at the important instant, which if lost can never be repeated.

—Edward Weston (1886 –1958)