Edward Weston
Edward Weston was born in Highland Park, Illinois, and grew up in Chicago. Employed in his teens as an errand boy and salesman for the Marshall Field department store, he began to make photographs in his free time. Traveling to California in 1906, Weston went from door to door taking portrait photographs. From 1908 to 1911, he studied at the Illinois College of Photography and then moved to California in 1911, where he opened a successful portrait studio. Working in a pictorialist style, Weston won numerous awards.
In the early 1920s, after being elected to the prestigious London Salon of Photography (successor to The Linked Ring, a pictorialist group), Weston grew increasingly dissatisfied with his soft-focus work and began to experiment with semi-abstract images. By the end of that decade, he had gained renown for his groundbreaking attention to the characteristics of expression and description that are unique to photography, as well as for his devotion to aesthetic purity. Of prime importance in his approach was the need to visualize in advance the final result. As Weston wrote in 1922, "The real test of not only technical proficiency, but intelligent conception, is not in the use of some indifferent negative as a basis to work from, but in the ability to see one's finished print on the ground glass in all its desired qualities and values before exposure." Weston's commitment to sharp details, rich textures, and clear description became the hallmarks of his portraits and images of objects and, landscapes. In 1932 he formed the California-based Group f/64 with a number of younger photographers, including Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and Willard Van Dyke. A tribute to Weston's working method, the name of the group refers to the smallest aperture available on a photographic lens; the selection of f/64 guarantees maximum sharpness throughout the image, from foreground to background.
Beginning in 1937, Weston grew increasingly interested in landscape photography, particularly when it involved the kind of complex spatial organization to be found in cities, including steel bridges, rail yards, and skyscrapers. In 1941 Weston produced seven negatives in Pittsburgh while photographing for a new edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.
As Andy Grundberg writes in EW100: Centennial Essays in Honor of Edward Weston, "In the last ten years of his working life, Weston perceived the American landscape not as something grand, primordial, and innocent, but as inhabited, acculturated and, in many places, despoiled. Not only do many of his pictures from this era recall Walker Evans's photography of the 1930s, but they also point directly to the socially conscious but stylistically restrained `New Topographic' mode of landscape photography of the last ten years, by photographers such as Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke and Stephen Shore."
Weston was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1937, the first photographer ever to receive this honor. His most significant publications are California and the West and My Camera at Point Lobos. From 1923 to 1943, Weston kept a journal, which was posthumously edited by Nancy Newhall and published as The Daybooks of Edward Weston.
