 Point, sir, the coast of California. We can see this beauty. We can even hear the winds meet and smell the brine. We can feel the great continent behind our backs and the power of the sea that slams against it. But how does one catch such a moment in order to give it to a friend or to live it over again ourselves? Perhaps in a phrase or in a brush stroke, perhaps in a song or a story or in a photograph. Most of us know how to point a black box at the things that give us pleasure, the new, the quaint, the odd. A 50th of a second of the sunshine is enough to produce a black and white outline that we can fill in later from memory. The funny faces will recall the laughter. The day I met those fishermen near Carmel, how they complained about their unquenchable thirst. The air was so fresh, the sun so warm. But the student of photography thinks that a camera is more than a device to jiggle the memory. Like a painting or a poem, a photograph can be an experience in itself. It can be the end to which the artist uses the beauty he finds about him. Here on the Pacific Coast, such an artist lives and works. To study photography with Edward Weston is an opportunity to learn a little about art itself. His house is simple. Where it is is more important to Weston than what it is. Or he uses it mainly as a headquarters for his frequent trips through the countryside. He explored Illinois that way in his childhood and now California. When he lives in a place, it belongs to him. He feels rich, though he owns nothing but his tools, his personal effects, and his cats. They say a man's character is reflected in the animals he loves. Gentle, delicate, amusing, cats are creatures that cherish privacy. They're quiet and curious, completely domesticated, yet not quite tame. Certainly, cats are always at home in Weston's home, in its ordered simplicity, in its uncluttered comfort. Here are the signs of a personality that's distilled out of a full, rich experience. The things around Weston's rooms are all fragments of what he's seen and felt and known, the beauty to be found in nature, Mexico, friends. He seems to like simple, uncomplicated things that most of us can understand and like. Down the coast 300 miles in Hollywood, they have a contraption that can wash a car in three minutes. In Europe, people say that this is America. Weston likes it. He thinks it's fun, but he doesn't think it's America. Machines and gadgets are convenient, he believes, but they cannot do our living for us. He won't let himself be used by them. He tends to weigh their value against what he has to give for them in terms of freedom or self-respect. The student who came to learn photography may be surprised to find herself talking philosophy, but Weston believes that his photographs must reflect what he thinks about the world around him. For instance, many of his fellow Americans consider Los Angeles a city of glamour. Weston lived here once, but now he only comes into town for an occasional visit. His personal inclination is toward nature and the outdoors, toward the good earth that's pleasant to the eye, even when it's working as a factory to produce man's food. He sees dignity and strength and beauty in the long rows of a giant California farm. He doesn't believe that man must scar the face of nature to use her wealth. But what is all this to do with photography or art? Just this, that the artist is first a man, and into his art he can put only what he feels and thinks as a man. To know what Weston likes is to know how he chooses the subjects of his photographs. His greatest pleasure is the simplest of all, the pleasure of looking at the varied scenery of California, looking for the richness and drama. For the strength and relaxation. For the pleasing, surprising form that men call beauty. Weston often climbs up into the Sierra Nevada's unphotographic trips. His most important tool is not his camera, but his eye. For the artist is first of all a selector, a searcher. He's a man who can search energetically and patiently. Who has the integrity to search for what pleases him, not for what he thinks will please others. In Weston's selection of a subject, lies the emotional experience of a lifetime. He's long since found out where to look and how to look. Just what aspects of this scene he can transfer to a piece of paper eight inches by 10 depends finally on what his tools can do. So his subject must be selected with the knowledge of the camera's powers and its limitations. It's a machine that operates by light. Light rays, reflected from the lake or mountain, pass through the lens and strike the sensitized coating of the film. So the quality of the reflected light that the photographer can see on his ground glass is a factor that he considers in making his selection. Weston has no rules for lighting. He simply looks for the light that will best reveal the nature of the material he's photographing. He still uses an old-fashioned view camera because it enables him to observe the most minute details of the scene before him. It's little more than a box that permits him to control the amount of light that strikes the film or to change the position of the film so that the image is sharp. The lens is the camera's eye. And like the human eye, it enables us to be selective. To pick out those sections of the total scene on which we wish to concentrate are those sections, the ones that please us. Why does this form interest the artist, or that one? No one knows, not even the artist. The forms, the lines, the shapes that affect Western's feelings often reappear in pictures of widely different subject matter. The reasons why we like things are often buried deep below our conscious minds, stemming perhaps from some long-forgotten experience in our childhood, or answering a need that we ourselves do not know we have. That's why, in looking at Western's photographs, it's often interesting to forget what they're about, to ask not what is this a picture of, but what does this shape remind me of? How does it make me feel? For Western is not only telling us what a particular rock or a flower or a bird looks like, but also what it means to him. If we do not catch his feeling, most of his message is lost. For his photographs, like all art, communicate both thought and feeling. The wind-sculptured sand dunes near his home furnish Western with one of his favorite subjects. The land-bound seascape, shifting and capricious in the changing light, presents an infinite number of pleasing shapes and forms. The problem is to photograph sand, sand that seems to flow, yet is gritty if we touch it, sand that's soft and warm and clean, sand that's yielding, though made of the material of rock. We have a camera to control the light. We have the light itself, illuminating and throwing shadows. Because Western does not trim his pictures or enlarge them, this is the moment of final selection. What instant to catch and make permanent? What particular section should fill our space? There is no object here to hold our interest. In the artist's approach to photography, there are no rules of composition. Because each picture presents its own special problem, he can use no shortcuts, no formulas. The answer must be worked out on the ground glass each time all over again. But how do we know when we've solved it? Can there be more than one answer? Perhaps. And the artist who can see and feel recognizes each one that's right for him. The state of California is larger than present-day Germany and Belgium combined. Western has been in most of its corners, looking, liking, and photographing. Even in Death Valley, dreaded for its fatal heat and dryness, Western has found a rich productive treasure. The material of art. What a man sees when he looks at a mountain is determined by the imagination, the training, the sensitivity of the mind behind the eyes, by what he knows and feels. Like other experienced photographers, Western does not trust his eyes when it comes to judging light intensity. He knows how easily he can be fooled by the very adaptability of the human organ. A photoelectric cell is a safer measuring device. This business of seeing is a strange phenomenon. Most of us feel that the higher up we climb, the more we can see. As the world becomes a map spread out before us, we think we see it all. A vast panorama that we can grasp at a glance and examine at our leisure. But men who are used to looking at nature know that often the part may tell a story more truthfully than the whole. A range of hills that oars us by its rugged grandeur might seem dull and insignificant if photographed from a distant peak. Meaning often depends on one's point of view. The photographer changes his point of view every time he moves his camera and every time he changes his lens. For his lens determines the size of the field that's recorded on his film. Although he remains in one place, his picture of a bunkhouse in the mountains can, by the substitution of a different lens, become a bunkhouse in a valley. And further, without moving the camera, a bunkhouse by the road. Or simply a bunkhouse. Western likes to work in the ruins of the abandoned mining town scattered through the west. The broken forms, the door frames bereft of doors, even the weather-worn surfaces of the stone have meaning for him. But the different distances of the objects from the camera raise problems of focus. The foreground is sharp, the doorway is fuzzy. By reducing his lens opening, the photographer can record the entire scene with needle sharpness. And by inserting a filter, he can change the light values, making the sky appear darker and the columns brighter. This attention to detail, this care and accuracy, this technique is what produces art in any medium, but only when it serves the feelings and the knowledge of the artist. That is the hardest part of an apprenticeship to art, to open the gates around our hearts so that we can feel freely, to clean up the clutter of our minds so that we can think clearly. No teacher, no master can tell us what to look for in the world around us, know how to evaluate what we find. They can encourage our patience, our inquisitiveness, our right to have our own feelings and our own ideas, but we must do our own work. We can imagine lives that were ended within these walls and other lives that began here to be lived out in places far away. What we do not know or feel is not likely to appear in our pictures. But the apprenticeship is not always so serious. The student, like the photographer, is also interested in live, healthy human beings who are still around to be photographed. And because Edward Western likes people, his portraits are often masterpieces. On the rocky shore below Monterey, where the salt air adds zest to spirits and to appetites, Western often invites his friends to picnic lunches. The informal atmosphere permits the guests to pursue their own interests, to enjoy the beauty that Western himself discovered here years ago. His own understanding of people, his personal affection for them, in due course find their way onto his negatives. His keen observant eye misses little that's significant about them. And because he knows their needs and their tastes so well, he makes a remarkable host. More remarkable still, he can even leave his guests alone to enjoy themselves. While he goes off to do his job, the precious afternoon light must not be wasted. Now that we know how he works, we can appreciate what goes into Western's creative process. An intense love first of the world around him. And then the sharp eye attuned to the values of the mind behind it. Third, the constant search for significant form. The need to find order in what first appears to be chaos. Finally, the disciplines of technique. The painstaking skill of the master craftsman. These things make a man an artist. They lift him out of the role of recorder to the heights of creation. They enable him to be sure of himself. Not here or here, but here is a thing of beauty. Let's leave the ocean in its grimmer moods for the pleasure of shelter and warmth. If Western goes reluctantly, it's because he also likes the sterner aspects of the sea. He's often taken advantage of this cold gray light to reveal details of nature that are sometimes distorted by bright sunshine. The photographer still has work to do. Unprinted negatives have the attraction and drama of buried treasure. The dark room is the setting in which the photograph finally comes to life. This workshop is as simple as it can be. Most amateur photographers can boast of more gadgets and machines than can be found here. Like the camera's Western uses, there isn't a device in this room that was unknown to technicians 50 years ago. He's merely learned to use the simple equipment with infinite skill. The selection has been made. But light, the energy of the photographic process can still be controlled. Even in this final stage, there is so much to learn to remember. Timing is a matter of long experience and precise information. The intensity of the light, the characteristics of the coated paper, contrast, tonal quality. Photography is art and science too. And then the weight. After 45 active years as a photographer, Western won't trade the excitement of these last minutes for anything in the world. A piece of his work, of him, is coming to life. It will do. The decision isn't hard to make when you've known all along what you were trying for. But if the print hadn't been right, there isn't a step in the whole process that Western wouldn't repeat 50 times until it was right. Art cannot afford compromise. Western is only one of a distinguished line of artists who've used the camera as a creative tool. The French painter de Gaere was the first, nearly 100 years ago. He and his followers rarely strayed from the subject matter and style of contemporary painting. Western loves to talk about these pioneers of his craft. About David Octavius Hill, who created a remarkable portrait gallery of 19th century Britons. About Julia Cameron, whose plates were commentaries on the romanticism of the Victorians. Nadar, in France, was attracted by the formalism of his time. But his photographs were pictures of real people. The first to exploit the camera's special powers of precision and accuracy was the American Matthew Brady. He refused to prettify Abraham Lincoln's noble homeliness, but his portraits revealed the beauty of character within the great emancipator. Brady carried his thirst for realism to war. Following the Union army with primitive camera and wet plates, he combined art and journalism. His portrait of Walt Whitman is a record of a poet's personality. Little wonder that Brady's work is still a source of inspiration to his countrymen. In later years, the Frenchman, Occe, revived the starkly realistic camera style. The principle of looking for beauty in the ordinary everyday backgrounds of modern life was also being developed at the turn of the century by Alfred Stieglitz. With his learned arguments and with his beautiful pictures, Stieglitz once and for all settled the question, is photography art? Today, that question is no longer debated. Men like Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, Western himself do not have to fight for recognition or appreciation. They do not have to come to us. We are more than willing to go to them. This is the Pacific coast of America. And this is an American artist who can reveal his country's beauty in a language that all men can understand. Like the rock, he is native to these shores. But unlike the rock, he can be shared by the whole world. Western is a fortunate man. He can give the world something he loves. He can give it America.