About my photo journal

When I think about Edward Weston, I think about his landscape photographs, not the most famous pepper series. The reason why I choose him as my project is that I love his modernist photography. I like Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Jeffrey Conley, and Edward Weston’s photography style. His photographs are are especially soft, simple, and sophisticated.

Also, he is a great technician. He knew what the photographs was going to be like before he took it. He has been said: “You should be able to point the camera down on the ground and see a photograph. ”  What he saying was a photographer should be able to have control of his equipment and eyes to be able to photograph, to compose the frame in anywhere and come up with something pleasing. He use 8×10 large format camera, and it’s not easy to set up. However, he didn’t let his equipment become a major part in the process, it was all about his vision and aesthetic view.

In this photo-blog project, I used digital camera, 35mm film camera, Hasselbled camera, even point and shoot camera. I didn’t want to let equipments limit me, and these are cameras that I’m familiar to work with. In this blog, I compared many photographs I took in Mexico with his landscape pictures, and I shot most of still like photographs in the studio to compare with his vegetable series. It was a fun process because it brings me back to the time when I traveled to the Mexico. Every little stories behind the picture, and people that I met over there. There are many similarities and differences between my photographs and Weston’s. In visions, I’m all alone. But in taste, I can connect myself to Edward Weston’s photographs by sharing my traveling experiences, or by exploring somewhere I have never been. All I try is to find my inside images in the outside reality, and that’s what I learn most from this project.