“To really blossom, one must feel wanted, loved: must feel a place is open to one’s especial capacity —not just any job. One’s work must have social significance, be needed, —to be vital. Art for art’s sake is a failure: the musician cannot play forever to an empty house. There must be balance—giving and receiving— of equal importance whether in sex or art. The creative mind demands an audience, must have one for fulfillment, to give reason for existence. I am not trying to turn the artist into a propagandist, a social reformer, but I say that art must have a living quality that relates it to present needs, or to future hopes, opens new roads for those ready to travel, those who were ripe but needed an awakening shock, —impregnation.”
Edward Weston, March 30, 1931 (from The Daybooks)
This quote really speaks to me as a photographer and as a person, we have ambition for our work, all of us and we want it to be recognised in some way by others which in part is why we are doing it in the first place. We make images because we find something interesting and want to share that something, which we find interesting with others. We then get into the thing of wanting the image to be interesting of itself, sometimes forgetting the original impulse of photographing the thing that was interesting to us. Then it gets confusing and metaphysical as we have tow different things happening then the desire to be better photographically and the desire to communicate what we saw and sometimes they get mixed in our minds leading us to forget our original impulse when making images.