Daily Inspiration Quote by Edward Weston

Weston is staging a quiet defense against the oldest accusation in art: that serious work is just expensive taste dressed up as principle. He admits to being "extravagant" with cameras, then immediately fences that admission with purpose. The dash - "anything photographic" - widens the confession while the next sentence narrows the motive: not luxury, but leverage. The best tools weren’t status objects; they were extensions of vision, a way to drag more clarity out of the world.

The pivot is the real tell. "In most things I have gone along with the plainest - or without" isn’t thrift-bragging so much as an ethics statement. Weston draws a bright line between consumption that feeds the work and consumption that feeds the ego. It’s an early, artist-grade version of what we now call intentionality: spend where it counts, strip everything else down to the studs.

Context matters. Weston’s career runs through photography’s fight to be taken seriously as art, not gadgetry or parlor trick. By the 1920s and 1930s, as modernism demanded precision and "straight photography" valued detail and tonal control, equipment could genuinely be the difference between a picture and a statement. His subtext: if you want to judge me, judge the prints, not the price tags.

There’s also a monkish romanticism here - the artist as ascetic technician. Weston isn’t claiming purity; he’s claiming priorities. The extravagance is permitted, even necessary, because it serves the one thing he refuses to compromise: seeing well.