Edward Weston

Edward Weston (1886-1958), American photographer, noted for his sharp, clear close-ups of rocks, seashells, vegetables, and other natural forms. His work emphasized the abstract beauty of the texture, shape, and structural detail in these forms.

Weston was born in Highland Park, Illinois. He began his career as a portraitist in Glendale, California, turning out elegant, soft-focus studio photographs, an approach that was then in vogue. After seeing abstract paintings for the first time at the 1915 San Francisco Panama Pacific Exhibition, he became more interested in sharp-focused, descriptive photography that captured the physical quality of the objects he photographed with exactitude. Weston eventually abandoned his successful portrait business and in 1923 went to Mexico with his family to begin a new artistic life. There he was encouraged by Mexican artists such as Diego Rivera, José Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Artistically refreshed after three years in Mexico, Weston returned to California in 1926 and began the series of richly detailed studies of cabbages, peppers, eroded rock, sand formations, trees bent by the wind, twisted kelp, and similar subjects that won him wide renown. He often used extreme close-ups to create a semiabstract quality, as in his studies of green peppers. Also outstanding, although less well known, were his studies of the female nude. His technique was uncluttered and direct, and his pictures, taken with an 8 x 10 view camera, always in natural daylight, were never enlarged, cropped, or retouched.

In 1937 Weston was the recipient of the first Guggenheim Foundation fellowship in photography. With the accompanying prize money he traveled through the western United States, taking pictures that were later published in his book California and the West (1940). Other books followed, among them his illustrated 1941 edition of Leaves of Grass, by American poet Walt Whitman. During his last years, Weston continued to produce fine photographs despite the crippling effects of Parkinson disease. The Daybooks of Edward Weston, a personal journal in which Weston recorded his experiences and thoughts on photography and life, were published after his death (Volume 1, 1961; Volume 2, 1966). Weston gave 500 prints of the American West to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, which put 150 of these photographs on exhibit in 2003.