Edward Weston
[Photographer, b. 1886, Highland Park, Illinois, d. 1958, Wildcat Hill, California.]
The hour is late, the light is failing... there stands my camera focused, trained like a gun, commanding the shells not to move a hair’s breath. And death to anyone who jars out of place what I know shall be a very important negative.
(On making the photograph Chambered Nautilus,
1927) 
One does not think during creative work, any more than one thinks when driving a car. But one has a background of years—learning, unlearning, success, failure, dreaming, thinking, experience, all this—then the moment of creation, the focusing of all into the moment. So I can make “without thought,” fifteen carefully considered negatives, one every fifteen minutes, given material with as many possibilities. But there is all the eyes have seen in this life to influence me.
...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.
I don’t give a tinker’s damn about being true to nature.
With over twenty years experience, I never try to plan in advance. Though I may from experience know about what I can do with a certain subject... I start out with my mind as free from an image as the silver film on which I am to record, and I hope as sensitive. Then indeed putting one’s head under the focusing cloth is a thrill... one becomes a discoverer, seeing a new world through the lens.
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.”
