Weston, Edward

Edward Weston's Book of Nudes

In 1953 the writer and curator Nancy Newhall assembled, with the cooperation of the photographer Edward Weston, a mock-up for an elegant book featuring Weston's photographs of the nude. It was the only book on this subject that Weston himself participated in creating. The sample book
intersperses landscapes and still lifes with nude studies and includes an essay written by Newhall on the artist's aesthetic. The proposal was rejected in the 1950s, however, by publishers of fine art photographs, who were reluctant to address the subject. In 1985 the mock-up was acquired by the J.
Paul Getty Museum with some pages and prints missing, yet it was only in 2006 that curator Brett Abbott recognized the key to reconstructing the unpublished book in its entirety. Now, in association with the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, the Getty has finally been able to
realize Newhall and Weston's vision. The present volume has been produced with distinctions of paper and ink to indicate those elements that have been added-including a preface by the curator and thumbnail reproductions of the mock-up as it now exists-and those elements that were part of the
original, including Newhall's essay and all thirty-nine photographs, arranged on the pages as Newhall and Weston had placed them.

Edward Weston: The Form of the Nude (Monographs)

Edward Weston (1886-1958) is one of the seminal figures of twentieth-century photography. An exponent of straight photography', Weston was committed to making photographs free from technical tricks and incoherent emotionalism' which were able to capture the essence of the subject. His series of self-portraits, nudes, landscapes and close-up still-lifes defined modernist photography in their formal elegance, simplicity and abstraction. The first photographer to win a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1937, Weston is among the most influential figures in the history of photography.

In Focus: Edward Weston: Photographs From the J. Paul Getty Museum (In Focus)

A seminal figure in the history of photography, Edward Weston (1886-1958) began his long and colorful career in Southern California. Among the more than fifty prints gleaned from the Getty Museum's important collection of approximately 240 works that span the photographer's career, this book
features pictures made in Claremont, Glendale, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and other locations in California and the U.S.
Weston wed machine-age aesthetics with vernacular subjects, pursuing Modernism as a way of seeing. He produced works of art using subject matter as wide-ranging as sea shells, green peppers, sand dunes and nudes, and he set a standard for elegant composition and print technique for generations of
photographers to come.
Commentaries on each of the featured works, as well as an introduction and chronology, are provided by Brett Abbott, curatorial assistant in the Getty Museum's Department of Photographs. A colloquium discussion on the artist's work includes Abbott's contributions as well as those of six other
participants: photographer William Clift; Amy Conger, author of Edward Weston: Photographs from the Collection of the Center for Creative Photography; David Featherstone, a freelance writer and editor; Weston Naef, curator of photographs at the Getty Museum; David Travis, curator of photography at
the Art Institute of Chicago; and Jennifer Watts, curator of photographs at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California.

Edward Weston: His Life

One of modern photography's greatest pioneers, Edward Weston awakened his viewers to the sensuous qualities of organic forms. In this biography Ben Maddow draws heavily on Weston's uncut journals and letters and on the reminiscences and written accounts of his closest friends and family to reveal the man behind the opaque formalism of the photographs.

Edward Weston: The Last Years in Carmel

This book appears in conjunction with an exhibition organized by The Art Institute of Chicago that focuses on the late work of photographer Edward Weston. Taken between1938 and 1948, these images reveal his shift from his formalist style, characterized by technological virtuosity and innovative compositions, to one that accommodated a greater psychological component. The first photographs of this period date from Weston's return to his spiritual home near Carmel, California, during his second Guggenheim fellowship. He now saw the surrounding coast with different eyes: while he had once focused on details and still lifes, he now found himself drawn to vistas, horizons, the movement of water, and moody atmospheres of elemental power. The seventy-plus photographs in this book, sumptuously printed in tritone reproductions, include--in addition to his images of nature--Weston's powerful portraits of his immediate family, as well as domestic scenes taken in and around his home. Also included is a critical essay exploring Weston's life and work during this period, by David Travis, Curator of Photography at the Art Institute and a longtime specialist in the career of Edward Weston.
Hardcover, 10.5 x 11.5 inches, 144 pages, 100 tritone illustrations.
Exhibition Schedule: Art Institute of Chicago, June-October 2001; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, March-June 2002.

Edward Weston (Aperture Masters of Photography)

A towering figure in twentieth-century photography, Edward Weston sought to lead viewers to "see through their eyes, not with them." His restless quest for beauty and the mystical presence behind it created a body of work unrivaled in the medium. This book offers Weston masterpieces spanning more than four decades. Included are his early Pictorialist images, industrial studies of Armco Steel, portraits from his Mexican period, the still lifes and landscapes of the thirties, and the sometimes acerbic images of the later years. R. H. Cravens's essay draws upon Weston's writings and recollections by sons, lovers, and friends. What emerges is the profile of "a thoroughly American genius--courageous, pure, troubled, unorthodox, and utterly sure of its purpose."

Edward Weston: Forms of Passion

Edward Weston: 1886-1958 (Midsize)

In 1902, the year Edward Weston was given his first camera, few people regarded photography as more than a craft. But along with innovators like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, Weston revolutionized the ways photographers chose subject material and used photographic techniques to create what gradually came to be accepted as fine art.

This is an elegant book, designed and printed in Germany, with an essay by Terence Pitts, of the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona. It presents 180 of Weston's finest images, including many--such as the pines of Point Lobos, the sand dunes of Oceano, and his stark, unadorned nudes--that have become icons. Whereas the photographs of Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy were, to Weston's eyes, hopelessly mannered, his images are elemental, organic, and in harmony with nature's rhythms. Weston spent most of his working life in Mexico and California, and much of his work, replete with shadows, is illuminated with the harsh light of those places. In 1932, he and Ansel Adams founded the influential photographic collective Group f/64, named after the lens-aperture size that exposed an image at its most detailed and clear. This was Weston's aesthetic: to show the real world in its unrelieved integrity rather than create an imaginary construct. He was concerned with visual truth, not with character or storytelling. Weston was a true pioneer whose rigorous vision permanently changed the ways we see the world around us. --John Stevenson

Few photographers have created such a legacy as Edward Weston (1886-1958). After a decade of successfully making photographs with painterly soft-focus techniques, Weston became the key pioneer of the school of precise and sharp presentation, dubbed "Straight Photography." Through the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, Weston was a major force in pushing forward the art of photography. His photographs are monuments of sensual realism, perfectly composed images of stillness that sear with passion and intensity. Whatever the subject, be it a vegetable, landscape, shell, or naked body, Weston's lens captures the essence of its life force, the fundamentals of its form.

Edward Weston Nudes

Lee Friedlander's photographs of women in their birthday suits leave me cold, but they invite comparison with Edward Weston's classic black and white nudes. Bare breasts and buttocks took on another dimension when Weston was behind the camera; his headless torsos more closely resemble the work of painters and sculptors than the passionless images of ladies decapitated by Friedlander and other contemporary photographers. Charis Wilson's memoir of posing for (and living with) Weston--and her under-the-skin take on the thought process behind his nude studies--is fascinating.

"To Weston's eye...the landscape of the human body was an unending revelation of forms both voluptuous and abstract. His genius as an artist lay in his ability to respond to both with equal passion." --Hilton Kramer, The New York Times

Margrethe Mather and Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration

An examination of the personal and professional relationship between two important American photographers. Margrethe Mather has been remembered mostly through the commentary of fellow photographer Edward Weston, who referred to her as "the first important person" in his life. In fact, Mather was probably the greatest influence on the development of Weston's early career. They first met in 1913 and soon developed a close relationship, eventually working together as full-fledged artistic partners and even co-signing the photographs they produced. Weston was also madly in love with Mather, and the two engaged in a brief affair during his first marriage. This book, which features work by both artists, chronicles their twelve-year association and sheds light on Mather, whose artistry, sexual identity, and mysterious past were overshadowed by the massive reputation of Edward Weston and his subsequent association with Tina Modotti. 94 duotone photographs.