Weston is best known for his still-lifes of peppers and shells, his heroic portraits, and his abstract close-ups of nudes, rocks, and trees. More than a great photographer, though, Weston was a pioneering modernist, one whose work evolved in response to contemporary movements in all the arts.
Edward Weston - Photography and Modernism : Museum of Fine arts in Boston. Online Exhibit of Weston's work - http://www.boston.com/mfa/weston
When Edward photographed, he tuned out the thought processes - the judging, comparing, weighing, and studying that usually mediate our relations with the world - and simply opened his eyes to all that lay before him. If his picture was there, he usually saw it instantly, almost as if it leapt out at him and demanded to be photographed. (...) His kind of seeing -- intuitive, intense, and immediate -- was the essence of Edward's creative gift.
Charis Wilson (E. Weston's second wife) in: EW100, Centennial Essays in Honor of Edward Weston, published by The Friends of Photography, Carmel, California, 1986

Suggested Readings..

- http://www.edward-weston.com : Official site of Edward Weston's Photography.
- The Daybooks of Edward Weston, Vol. 1 & 2. Newhall, Nancy ed. - Millerton, New York: Aperture, 1973
- Suppreme Instants: The Photography of Edward Weston. "A New York Graphic Society Book",
  Little, Brown & Company, Boston, 1986

Inspiring Toughts...

The photographer should see his finished print on the ground glass, which is simply to say that he should know exactly what he is doing.(....) Pictures came first. Rules followed. No one ever became an artist by learning rules or keeping them. It takes a great deal more than that. A person might be a demon at composition and still having nothing to say. (....) The manipulator can stick some clouds in a vacant sky, paint out a couple of houses, move the gate from the right to the left end of the wall, and remove the telephone wires to get the "composition" right. But the Purist must do all this before making the exposure! That is, he must see his subject just as he wants it to appear in the finished print; he must consider the relationships of every value and every detail - he must rely on a keen sense of composition before exposure, rather than manual dexterity in subsequent procedures.
"What is a Purist?", Camera Craft Magazine, January 1939

Clouds, torso's, shells, peppers, trees, rocks, smokestacks, are but interdependent, interrelated parts of a whole -- which is life. Light rythms, felt in no matter what, become symbols of the whole. The creative force in man recognizes and records -- with the medium most suitable to him, the object of the moment - these rythms, feeling the cause, the life within the outer form
    "Recording unfelt facts by acquired rule results in sterile inventory.
    "To see the thing itself is essential; the quintessence revealed direct, without the fog of impressionism - the casual noting of transitory or superficial phase.
    "This then: to photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock. Significant representation - not interpretation.
    "I start with no preconceived idea - discovery excites me to focus - then rediscovery through the lens - final form of presentation seen on ground glass, the finished print previsioned, complete in every detail of texture, movement, proportion, before exposure.
    "The shutter's release, which automatically and finally fixes my conception, allowing no after manipulation - the print, which is but a duplication of all that I saw and felt through my camera
Statement in the catalog for the exhibition at the Museum for Fine Arts, Houston, 1930

Photography is not at all seeing in the sense that the eyes see. Our vision, a binocular one, is in a continuous state of flux, while the camera captures and fixes forever (unless the damn prints fade!) a single, isolated condition of the moment. Besides, we use lenses of various focal length to purposely exxagerate actual seeing, and we often "overcorrect" colour for the same reason. In printing we carry on our willful distortion of fact by using contrasty papers which give results quite different from the scene or object as it was in nature
Edward Weston to Ansel Adams, January 28, 1932.Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona

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
The Daybooks of Edward Weston, Vol.1: Mexico, ed. Nancy Newhall (Millerton, N.Y.:Aperture, 1973)

As a creative medium, black and white has, at the start, an advantage over color in that it is already a step removed from the factual rendition of the scene
E. Weston, Undated note, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona

Popular Photography magazine in 1962 described Smith, then forty-two, as the world's greatest photographer and called him "the youngest living legend in photography." Life magazine described his essays as "the most memorable we have ever published." The executive editor of Life, Wilson Hicks, said that Smith made "the camera a part of himself, primarily emotionally, also aesthetically, intellectually, and, of course, physically. He had a way of forcing himself into the machine and through it into his photographs."
Ken Kobre (San Francisco State University) "A Last Interview With W. Eugene Smith."
...His pictures began to express a tragic lyricism infused with a benevolent melancholy. He shaded his prints with ever-deepening contrasts between dark and light, creating a visual metaphor for the basic struggle that he was witnessing in civilization, and feeling waged within himself...
Sam A. Stephenson "Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project"

Suggested Readings..

Minamata
by W. Eugene and Aileen M. Smith; Center Creative Photography, 1981. ASIN: 093826205X
A two-year study of the effects and repercussions from mercury poisoning on a small fishing village in Japan via toxic waste being dumped into the sea. (Out of Print)

Let Truth Be the Prejudice - W. Eugene Smith: His Life and Photographs
Ben Maddow, Eugene Smith, et al; Aperture, 1985. ISBN 0893811793
Survey of Smith's work - pictures accompanied by lengthy quotations from E. Smith - bibliography of photo essays and writings by and about Smith

W. Eugene Smith: Shadow and Substance: The Life and Work of an American Photographer
Jim Hughes ; McGraw-Hill, 1989. ASIN: 0070311234

W. Eugene Smith: Photographs 1934-1975
Gilles Mora, John P. Hill, W. Eugene Smith, et al; Harry N Abrams Inc., 1998. ISBN: 0810941910
Includes a collection of 350 photographs

http://photo-seminars.com/Fame/eugesmith.htm

Inspiring Toughts...

I would that my photographs might be, not the coverage of a news event, but an indictment of war -- the brutal corupting viciousness of its doing to the minds and bodies of men; and, that my photographs might be a powerful emotional catalyst to the reasoning which would help this vile and criminal stupidity from beginning again.
W. Eugene Smith: His Photographs and Notes. Aperture Foundation Incorporated,1969

You can go out and take pictures forever, and still never pull together an integrated photographic sequence, unless you have thought about the entire story or essay. A collection of pictures so often is nothing more than a portfolio that you bring together, a group of photos that do not have the interrelationship that pictures of a photographic essay should have. (...) I can best describe the relationship as something that is optical and mental at once. One photograph says something about the subject. The next photograph may amplify on that subject, or the picture may add its own dimension to the subject. When you have two photographs - or perhaps three - together they establish a special point that gives three different viewpoints. Sometimes the relationship of the pictures can be contradictory; sometimes the connection can be complementary; but sometimes I've taken three entirely different pictures, and made them work together, because each picture stated a different point, yet together had a relationship that invited many thoughts instead of a single one.
Ken Kobre: A Last Interview With W. Eugene Smith. [http.//www.gigaplex.com/photo/kobre/smithqa/smithqa.htm]

Photography is just a weak voice, but sometimes, only sometimes, one or more pictures can take our senses to the conciousness; photography induces in octations to so intense emotions that reach the point of reagent of the mind.
W. Eugene and Aileen M. Smith: Minamata. Alskog-Sensorium Book, 1975

Up to and including the moment of exposure, the photographer is working in an undeniably subjective way. By his choice of technical approach, by the selection of the subject matter...and by his decision as to the exact cinematic instant of exposure, he is blending the variables of interpretation into an emotional whole.
W. Eugene Smith: Time-Life - Photographers on Photography.

What uses having a great depth of field, if there is not an adequate depth of feeling?
W. Eugene Smith

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