Edward Weston 1886-1958

 

 
 
 

Among the twentieth century’s most influential art photographers, Edward Weston is widely respected for his many contributions to the field of photography. Along with Ansel Adams, Weston pioneered a modernist style characterized by the use of a large-format camera to create sharply focused and richly detailed black-and-white photographs.

The combination of Weston’s stark objectivity and his passionate love of nature and form gave his still lifes, portraits, landscapes, and nudes qualities that seemed particularly suited for expressing the new American lifestyle and aesthetic that emerged from California and the West between the two world wars. He spent the years 1923–1926 in Mexico City as a part of an international milieu of creative minds attracted by the post-revolutionary excitement of political activists and artists such as Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, Tina Modotti, and others. From the moment he returned to the United States, he began making work that would fundamentally change the direction of photography in this country.

In 1932, Weston, his son Brett, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and a handful of other Bay Area photographers formed a group of like-minded realists who called themselves Group f/64, in honor of an aperture setting on a lens one might stop down to in order to attain the sharpest focus in a photograph. They introduced their work in an exhibition at San Francisco’s DeYoung Museum, and the exhibition still stands as a landmark in the history of photography. In 1937 Weston became the first photographer to be awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. He continued working until Parkinson’s disease forced him to give up the camera in 1948.

  

   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
photo by: Cole Weston
   

   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
Jean Charlot | B&W Print | 436.16.10
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Chicago River 1916 | Toned B&W Print | 434.16.10
  
 
 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
Jose Clemente Orozco 1930 | B&W Print | 437.16.10
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Katherine Edson | 8x10 B&W Print | 440.16.10
  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
Imogen Cunningham 1933 | B&W Print | 441.16.10
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Civilian Defense 1942 | B&W Print | 435.16.10
  
     
  Edward Weston Collection Slide show  
     
Nude with arms crossed under right Brests | B&W Print | 438.16.10
       
 
© 2018 Inland Empire Museum of Art
All Art © by The Artist
  
All images printed by Dody Weston Thompson