Edward Weston was one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century. Over the course of his 40-year career Weston photographed an increasingly expansive set of subjects, including landscapes, still lifes, nudes, portraits, genre scenes, and even whimsical parodies.
Background
Edward Henry Weston was born on March 24, 1886, in Highland Park, Illinois. He was the second child and only son of Edward Burbank Weston, an obstetrician, and Alice Jeanette Brett, a Shakespearean actress. Before his mother's death when Weston was five years old, she urged her son to pursue a practical profession as a businessman. It was Weston's father and sister Mary, nine years his senior, who soon recognized his artistic potential and encouraged him to consider photography. Mary, who was only thirteen at the time of their mother's passing, became the dominant motherly influence in Weston's life. Their father recalled: "they grew up with a double love - that of a mother and son and a sister and brother."
Education
Weston attended Illinois College of Photography from 1908 to 1911.
Weston began dabbling in photography in 1902 at the age of 16 when his father gave him his first camera - a Kodak box camera, Bull's Eye #2. The gift came with handwritten instructions from Weston's father and basic recommendations about lighting and how to choose worthy subjects. The youth's earliest photographs captured life on his aunt's farm in Michigan where he summered as well as park scenes in Chicago, including Washington Park. When four years later the magazine Camera and Darkroom published his photograph Spring, Chicago in a full-page spread, Weston left Illinois to join his sister Mary, then living in Tropico, California, with her family, to cultivate a career in photography. Realizing the need for formal training, in 1908 Weston returned east and attended the Illinois College of Photography in Effingham, Illinois. He completed the 12-month course in six months and returned to California. In Los Angeles, he was employed as a retoucher at the George Steckel Portrait Studio.
In 1909, Weston moved on to the Louis A. Mojoiner Portrait Studio as a photographer and demonstrated outstanding abilities with lighting and posing.) In 1911, Weston opened his own portrait studio in Tropico, California. This would be his base of operation for the next two decades. Weston became successful working in soft-focus, pictorial style; winning many salons and professional awards. Weston gained an international reputation for his high key portraits and modern dance studies. Articles about his work were published in magazines such as American Photography, Photo-Era and Photo Miniature. Weston also authored many articles himself for many of these publications. In 1912, Weston met photographer Margrethe Mather in his Tropico studio.
Mather becomes his studio assistant and most frequent model for the next decade. Mather had a very strong influence on Weston. He would later call her, “the first important woman in my life.” Weston began keeping journals in 1915 that came to be known as his “Daybooks.” They would chronicle his life and photographic development into the 1930’s.
In 1922 Weston visited the ARMCO Steel Plant in Middletown, Ohio. The photographs taken here marked a turning point in Weston’s career. During this period, Weston renounced his Pictorialism style with a new emphasis on abstract form and sharper resolution of detail. The industrial photographs were true straight images: unpretentious, and true to reality. Weston also traveled to New York City this same year, where he met Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler and Georgia O’Keeffe.
In 1923 Weston moved to Mexico City where he opened a photographic studio with his apprentice and lover Tina Modotti. Many important portraits and nudes were taken during his time in Mexico. It was also here that famous artists; Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and Jose Orozco hailed Weston as the master of 20th-century art.
After moving back to California in 1926, Weston began his work for which he is most deservedly famous: natural forms, close-ups, nudes, and landscapes. Between 1927 and 1930, Weston made a series of monumental close-ups of seashells, peppers, and halved cabbages, bringing out the rich textures of their sculpture-like forms. Weston moved to Carmel, California in 1929 and shot the first of many photographs of rocks and trees at Point Lobos, California. Weston became one of the founding members of Group f/64 in 1932 with Ansel Adams, Willard Van Dyke, Imogen Cunningham and Sonya Noskowiak. The group chose this optical term because they habitually set their lenses to that aperture to secure maximum image sharpness of both foreground and distance. 1936 marked the start of Weston’s series of nudes and sand dunes in Oceano, California, which are often considered some of his finest work. Weston became the first photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship for experimental work in 1936. Following the receipt of this fellowship Weston spent the next two years taking photographs in the West and Southwest United States with assistant and future wife Charis Wilson. Later, in 1941 using photographs of the East and South Weston provided illustrations for a new edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
Weston began experiencing symptoms of Parkinson’s disease in 1946 and in 1948 shot his last photograph of Point Lobos. In 1946 the Museum of Modern Art, New York featured a major retrospective of 300 prints of Weston’s work. Over the next 10 years of progressively incapacitating illness, Weston supervised the printing of his prints by his sons, Brett and Cole. His 50th Anniversary Portfolio was published in 1952 with photographs printed by Brett. An even larger printing project took place between1952 and 1955. Brett printed what was known as the Project Prints. A series of 8 -10 prints from 832 negatives considered Edward’s lifetime best. The Smithsonian Institution held the show, “The World of Edward Weston” in 1956 paying tribute to his remarkable accomplishments in American photography. Edward Weston died on January 1, 1958 at his home, Wildcat Hill, in Carmel, California. Weston’s ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean at Pebbly Beach at Point Lobos.
Achievements
Edward Weston was an influential photographer of the 20th century. With his efforts, he helped people see photography as an art. The type of photographs in which Weston specialized are called “straight photography,” where no unusual effects are done to change the image of the photograph.
In 1937 Weston was the first photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, and over the next two years he produced nearly 1,400 negatives using his 8 × 10 view camera. Some of his most famous photographs were taken of the trees and rocks at Point Lobos, California, near where he lived for many years.
As of 2013, two of Weston's photographs feature among the most expensive photographs ever sold. A nude taken in 1925 was bought by the gallerist Peter MacGill for $1.6 million in 2008. Nautilus of 1927 was sold for $1.1 million in 2010, also to MacGill.
Similar to images used by the Surrealists, Weston's high resolution, realist photographs of organic forms and modern marvels encouraged viewers to reconsider seemingly mundane objects and form new associations with them.
Quotations:
Discussing his trip with the Radio Times he spoke of his approach to entering war zones: "I have risked my life endless times, and ended up in the hospital with all kinds of burns and shell wounds. I have those reptile eyes that see behind and in front of me. I’m constantly trying to stay alive. I’m aware of warfare, of hidden mines."
Weston later wrote, “The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.”
Membership
Weston cofounded the f/64 Group, which promoted rather than disguised the characteristics of photography and, in so doing, transformed the photographer from printmaker to artist. In 1951 Weston became an honorary fellow of the Photographic Society of America.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"Weston is, in the real sense, one of the few creative artists. He has recreated the matter-forms and forces of nature; he has made these forms eloquent of the fundamental unity of the world. His work illuminates man's inner journey toward perfection of the spirit."
Connections
Within days of his visit to Tropico, Weston was introduced to his sister's best friend, Flora May Chandler. She was a graduate of the Normal School, later to become UCLA. She assumed the position of a grade-school teacher in Tropico. She was seven years older than Weston and a distant relative of Harry Chandler, who at that time was described as the head of "the single most powerful family in Southern California.
On January 30, 1909, Weston and Chandler married in a simple ceremony. The first of their four sons, Edward Chandler Weston, known as Chandler, was born on April 26, 1910. Named Edward Chandler, after Weston and his wife, he later became an excellent photographer on his own. He clearly learned much by being an assistant to his father in the bungalow studio. In 1923 he bid farewell to his mother and sibling brothers and sailed off to Mexico with his father and Tina Modotti. He gave up any aspirations in pursuing photography as a career after his adventures in Mexico. On December 16, 1911, Weston's second son, Theodore Brett Weston, was born. He became a long-time artistic collaborator with his father and an important photographer on his own.
Sometime in the fall of 1913, Los Angeles photographer, Margrethe Mather visited Weston's studio because of his growing reputation, and within a few months they developed an intense relationship. Weston was a quiet Midwestern transplant to California, and Mather was a part of the growing bohemian cultural scene in Los Angeles. She was very outgoing and artistic in a flamboyant way, and her permissive sexual morals were far different from the conservative Weston at the time - Mather had been a prostitute and was bisexual with a preference for women. Meanwhile, Flora was spending all of her time caring for their children. Their fourth son, Cole Weston, was born on January 30, 1919, and afterward she rarely had time to leave their home.
Over the summer of 1920 Weston met two people who were part of the growing Los Angeles cultural scene: Roubaix de l'Abrie Richey, known as "Robo" and a woman he called his wife, Tina Modotti. Modotti, who was then known only as a stage and film actress, was never married to Robo, but they pretended to be for the sake of his family. Weston and Modotti were immediately attracted to each other, and they soon became lovers. Richey knew of Modotti's affair, but he continued to be friends with Weston and later invited him to come to Mexico and share his studio.
Until now Weston had kept his relationships with other women a secret from his wife, but as he began to photograph more nudes Flora became suspicious about what went on with his models. Chandler recalled that his mother regularly sent him on "errands" to his father's studio and asked him to tell her who was there and what they were doing.
In early April, 1929, Weston met photographer Sonya Noskowiak at a party, and by the end of the month she was living with him. As with many of his other relationships, she became his model, muse, pupil and assistant. They would continue to live together for five years.
In early 1934, "a new and important chapter opened" in Weston's life when he met Charis Wilson at a concert. Even more than with his previous lovers, Weston was immediately captivated by her beauty and her personality. He wrote: "A new love came into my life, a most beautiful one, one which will, I believe, stand the test of time." On April 22 he photographed her nude for the first time, and they entered into an intense relationship. He was still living with Noskowiak at that time, but within two weeks he asked her to move out, declaring that for him other women were "as inevitable as the tides."
