Aging & Wisdom Quote by Kim Weston

It lands like a deadpan punchline, the kind you only earn after decades of watching taste, money, and institutional attention drift past your work. Kim Weston isn’t romanticizing the starving-artist trope; he’s puncturing it. The line is funny because it’s flat. No rage, no self-pity, just a blunt status update that exposes how little the market cares about time served.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of the art economy’s myth of eventual justice: keep making good work, build a body of images, and recognition will follow. Weston flips that script. Age, in this telling, doesn’t confer authority or security; it just upgrades the adjective before “photographer.” Old becomes a credential in biography notes, not a guarantee at the gallery.

Context matters. Weston carries one of the heaviest surnames in American photography, and that shadow cuts both ways. Legacy offers access and expectation, but it also invites comparisons and a cruel kind of accounting: if you’re a “Weston,” why aren’t you selling? The line hints at the pressure of lineage and at a market that prizes narrative as much as vision. Being “old” should make you collectible; not selling suggests the machinery of status - dealers, curators, collectors - hasn’t decided you’re part of the story.

It’s also a photographer’s joke about visibility. Photographers spend their lives making others seen. Here, the maker stays stubbornly unseen by the one audience that supposedly counts: buyers. The humor is the point, and the sting.