1997
Dody Weston Thompson, Point Lobos, California, by Robert Backstrand
1949
Brett Weston by Third Wife Dody Weston Thompson
(A memoir and a summation by Dody Weston Thompson)
A memoir and a summation by Dody Weston Thompson
https://www.amazon.com/EDWARD-WESTON-LIFE-WORK-Photographs/dp/1888899093/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&qid=1606479244&refinements=p_27%3ADody+Weston+Thompson&s=books&sr=1-1&text=Dody+Weston+Thompson
2005
(A centennial tribute to Brett Weston by his closest colle...)
A centennial tribute to Brett Weston by his closest colleagues.
https://www.amazon.com/Brett-Weston-At-One-Hundred/dp/0615539777/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&qid=1606479244&refinements=p_27%3ADody+Weston+Thompson&s=books&sr=1-2&text=Dody+Weston+Thompson
2011
1948
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1952
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Dody Weston Thompson (Warren Weston) was born on April 11, 1923, in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. Dody - a childhood nickname that she adopted on her own - was born Dora Harrison. Both her parents were early influences on her later career.
While a teen in New Orleans, Dody Thompson was exposed to Pictorialism. Among her mother's circle of associates was the experimental and avant-garde photographer Clarence John Laughlin. Fourteen-year-old Dody was frequently pressed into service as a model as well as an assistant to carry his props and camera equipment.
Dody Weston Thompson studied at Tulane University (now H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College) in New Orleans and at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina.
Dody Thompson landed - with an introduction by her mother - a position in San Francisco as a researcher-writer for the West Coast Office of War Information. She also worked as a freighter riveter at the Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, California across the Bay from San Francisco. Fortuitously, photographers Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange were hired by Fortune Magazine in 1944 to photo-document a 24-hour sequence of the workers at the shipyards. While leaving her shift one afternoon, she noticed a man "capering under a black camera cloth and a big camera on a tripod." Years later, while working for Ansel, Dody Thompson saw his photograph of a throng of women descending the steps of the shipyard and recognized her own face among the crowd.
Dody Thompson married a second time, in 1946, to artist Philip Warren. Unfortunately, the couple separated, and she found a place of her own in San Francisco and began to explore her next step in life. She attended an Edward Weston retrospective organized by Beaumont and Nancy Newhall for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in early 1946. Dody Thompson became absolutely transfixed with the imaginative, naturalistic style of the nascent West Coast photographic trend. She then sought out Edward Weston in 1947 at the age of 24. While on summer vacation, Dody Thompson drove from San Francisco to the beach near his studio home in Carmel. In her own words in a private journal, she wrote, "I had been given courage. Before it could ebb, I found a public phone and dialed" - and she reached Edward himself. Intrigued by their common interest in photography, Edward asked Dody Thompson to meet with him in an hour. After she arrived at his studio, he showed her, according to Dody's memoirs, print after print of his platinum-developed photographs. Dody described this meeting as "my first stunning lesson in photography."
Weston mentioned he had just that morning written a letter to Ansel Adams, looking for someone seeking to learn photography in exchange for carrying his bulky large-format camera and to provide a much-needed automobile. Edward was developing Parkinson's disease and the physical demands of the profession were difficult for him. This was the era of heavy, wooden large-format view cameras with their accompanying tripods, lenses, cut film, film holders, filters, and cleansers - all toted around in the field. Dody Thompson had a thirst for photography, she had the strong body to carry equipment, and she had driven to Carmel in her own car. There was a swift meeting of creative minds. For the remainder of 1947 through the beginning of 1948, Dody Thompson commuted from San Francisco on weekends to learn from Weston the basics of photography.
Edward encouraged Dody to become a portrait photographer to generate revenue for herself, which he himself had done in his early career. Dody Thompson opened a small studio in San Francisco and her solid portraiture work launched her reputation as a photographer.
In early 1948, Dody Thompson moved into "Bodie House," the guest cottage named after its wood stove at Edward's Wildcat Hill compound, as his full-time assistant. On Edward's advice, she acquired her own camera - a wooden Agfa Ansco large format 5"X7" view camera - and began to photograph the panoramic Carmel coast and its subtle intricacies.
In 1949, her reputation caught the attention of Ansel Adams. Dody Thompson assisted the famed photographer for a year during a photographic expedition in Yosemite National Park and then at his studio in San Francisco. 1949 was a professionally pivotal year for Dody Thompson. She was invited to artistically participate with the remaining members of the prestigious organization Group f/64. Dody's early camera work then began to be exhibited, purchased, and represented in a number of museums and private collections, including the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (1949) and the Chicago Institute of Design (1950).
Dody Thompson was the last of Edward Weston's photographic assistants and remained very close to him during the final 11 years of his life as he struggled with his Parkinson's. The final photographs Edward Weston ever took were of a close-up of beach stones, teasingly subtitled "Dody Rocks", and of a portrait of Dody against boulders, at Point Lobos, California (1948).
Weston recognized Dody's considerable writing talent and entrusted her to craft the preface to My Camera on Point Lobos in 1949, launching her prolific writing career. Dody Thompson was as well a co-founder of the famous journal Aperture, a high-quality magazine for the professional photographer, showcasing the finest images and profiling the field's most acclaimed artists. After two years of preparation, the first issue debuted in Spring, 1952 with Dody as a contributing writer. She continued to write extensively on the topics of photography and fine arts.
Dody's photographic career ignited in 1952 when Dody Thompson was one of the two photographic winners of the prestigious Albert M. Bender Award (known informally in the West as the "Little Guggenheim"), which financed a year's work in photography. She was the second photographer to win the award other than Ansel Adams, who received the honor in 1946.
Dody Thompson found employment as a documentary consultant, researcher, writer, and crew member with Hollywood producer Lou Stoumen from 1956 to 1960. Her screen credits include a Motion Picture Academy Award-nominated documentary The Naked Eye (1956), highlighting Edward's work. She also gained recognition for Stouman’s Documentary Short Subject Oscar-winner The True Story of the Civil War (1957), which extensively used still photographs by famous Civil War photographer Mathew Brady.
As Dody Thompson matured, the physical rigors of active photographic expeditions were too difficult to undertake and her professional career shifted to writing, exhibiting, and lecturing. She spent her last active decades exhibiting her photographs, working on documentary projects, writing about photography and about the legacy of Edward Weston, and lecturing at numerous colleges, art museums, and fine arts institutions.
Dody Thompson took her final black-and-white photograph in 1966 and her last color photograph of wet kelp on a tide pool rock at Point Lobos in 1997. Her final exhibit and public speaking engagement were at Los Angeles Valley College in 2006 as part of the retrospective Perceptions, Bay Area Photography, 1945-1960 curated by Dennis Reed.
Of all the many symposiums in which she participated, the most significant was the May 1998 panel in San Francisco, "Through Another Lens: A Historical and Critical Look at California Arts Photography in the 1930s & 1940s". This forum included Dody, Charis, Cole (Edward Weston's youngest son) Rondal Partridge (son of photographer Imogen Cunningham), and Seema Weatherwax (former assistant to Ansel Adams).
In 2006 Dody Thompson received a Certificate of Recognition from the California State Legislative Assembly for her contribution to the fine arts, to the history of photography, and as a founder of Aperture magazine.
Dody Thompson passed at her residence in Los Angeles, California on October 14, 2012, at 8:30 am. She was 89.
Dody Thompson learned the art in 1947 and developed her own expression of "straight" or realistic photography, the style that emerged in Northern California in the 1930s.
Dody Thompson worked closely with contemporary icons Edward Weston (her former father-in-law), Brett Weston (her former husband), and Ansel Adams (as an assistant and a friend) during the late 1940s and through the 1950s, with additional collaboration with Brett Weston in the 1980s.
Dody Thompson penned a commentary on the history of photography and on the techniques of contemporary photographers, focusing on the artistic legacies of Edward Weston and his son Brett Weston. Her articles appeared in many photography books and journals from 1949 through 2003. Her skill in literary criticism was highlighted in her chapter on the novelist Pearl S. Buck in the 1968 book American Winners of the Nobel Literary Prize.
Her camera work is represented in dozens of museums and private collections as well as in many photographic books and magazines. Dody Thompson also participated in multiple solo and group exhibitions from 1948 through 2006 in the United States and Japan.
(A centennial tribute to Brett Weston by his closest colle...)
2011(A memoir and a summation by Dody Weston Thompson)
2005
Quotations:
"I have always approached photography as an artist. The first thing I learned about photography was that it is seeing - pre-visioning - with the eye and not the apparatus of the camera. Anyone can learn the basic mechanics first, but then you experiment. Photograph what you know to begin, but try to look, to see with a fresh eye. Images are everywhere around us - in our own backyard. I like finding rather than accumulating (staging the arrangement of what is photographed) - like an eternal treasure hunt of the eye."
"I had never realized that this virtually infinite variety of intermediate shades of black and white constituted a unique phenomenon...not to be found in any other medium in the entire history of art...this scale of greys which the skilled photographer - never mind the appearance of the original subject - can expand or contract like an accordion of unknown but variable-length pretty much at will."
Dody Thompson was invited in 1949 to artistically participate with the remaining members of the photographic organization Group f/64, a bastion of the emerging West Coast Photographic Movement. In 1950, she was also one of the founding members of the non-profit organization that published the photographic journal Aperture in 1952, to which she was also a contributor.
In the many interviews with Dody Thompson and with family members it is clear that the freedom to explore her creativity, to share her insights with the world, and to encourage young people to hone their creative skills were the themes of her life. Those who knew her to describe her as a gifted and master transmitter of what is captured in the eye and lens.
Quotes from others about the person
Contemporary photographer Merg Ross, son of photographer Don Ross, commented on Dody's two careers in both black and white and color photography. He calls her black and white photos "her jewels in the crown... the subtle, delicate, well-composed strong images."
Rondal Partridge, son of famous photographer Imogen Cunningham, summarized Dody as being "the most focused person I had ever met. She was quick-thinking; she knew the 'who, what, when, and where' of photographic composition and she knew where the rainbow was... and she went after it."
Famous photographer Paula Chamlee admires Dody's gifted writing style and notes that Dody's published works "have added to the history of photography in a very meaningful and significant way."
Dody Thompson decided to marry her Tulane love Bill Diffenderfer in 1944. The couple left New Orleans and headed to San Francisco where he was stationed during World War II. In 1946, Dody's war-time marriage unraveled and she divorced. She married a second time, also in 1946, to artist Philip Warren. Unfortunately, Warren became deeply committed to a San Francisco religious movement. She had to decide to either embrace this group or leave the marriage.
Theodore Brett Weston served in the Signal Corps in New York during World War II and returned afterward to Carmel to live, first at Wildcat Hill and later in 1948 at Garrapata Canyon, to work in his father's darkroom and to pursue his own photography. He and Dody Thompson grew to know each other as they worked on photographic projects and enjoyed family meals together. By March 1950 Dody and he were dating and Dody moved to Brett's home at Garrapata Canyon.
Dody and Theodore Brett Weston eventually married at Point Lobos in Carmel, California in November 1952. Even though Dody became known professionally as Dody Weston after marrying Brett, she chose to sign her work simply "Dody". Unfortunately, Dody's marriage to Brett became stormy in 1955. They divorced in 1956.
Abraham Harrison's profession as a filmmaker offered Dody her first introduction to the sights, sounds, and smells of film processing. Known as Harry Harrison, he was first a minor league ballplayer, then a newspaper photographer, and finally a producer of the famous Fox Movietone News, the short news and sports newsreels that played from 1928 until 1963 in theaters before the feature films.
Hilda Rosenfield Harrison, a professional woman, was an artist at heart and surrounded herself with creative friends from the famous French Quarter of New Orleans.
