This essay features a discussion of an unpublished lecture, entitled “Reading Weston,” given by the filmmaker, photographer, and theorist, Hollis Frampton, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 1979. Structured as a montage-criticism that demonstrates an epistemology of performance, Frampton’s lecture stages the aesthetic, philosophical, and political stakes of his own lifelong project, as he re-inflects Edward Weston’s photographic theory and practice. Following the title’s allusion to Althusser and Balibar’s Reading Capital, and Annette Michelson’s 1976 essay, “Reading Eisenstein Reading Capital,” Frampton reads directly from Weston’s Daybooks (written during his sojourn in Mexico), interspersed with excerpts from select Marxist texts, in order to reinvent Weston’s contribution to photographic modernism as a politically engaged practice. Mirroring the form of his lecture with its content, Frampton reveals how an epistemology of performance applies as well to photographic production and reception, thereby offering a proof of his theory of photographic media.