Edward Weston

photographer

“Edward had come to be regarded as the chief of the so-called purists’’, wrote Charis Wilson, Edward Weston’s second wife, travelling companion and collaborator. As a photographer, Weston was indeed a purist. Above all, he was an advocate of photography as a genre in its own right, not as an attempt to imitate painting. In this respect, Weston is philosophically linked to Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession movement. Weston’s prints were always ‘straight’ – he did not manipulate negatives or prints and chose to use large cameras that allowed him to make 5×7 and 8×10 contact prints.
Edward Weston was born on 24 March 1886 in Highland Park, Illinois. Weston’s mother died when he was five, and his older sister May played an important role in his upbringing. Weston took his first photographs in 1902 with a Kodak Bulls-Eye #2, a gift from his father. Excited by the success of his photographs, Weston soon saved up enough money to buy a second-hand 5×7 camera with a ground glass and tripod. After leaving school the following year, Weston went to work for Marshall Field & Co. in Chicago.
He continued to take photographs in his spare time.
That same year, Weston attended the Ninth American Salon at the Chicago Art Institute. Although no well-known photographers were represented at the Salon, the work he saw there made a strong impression on him.
Weston’s sister May had married John Seaman and moved to Tropico (now Glendale), California, near Los Angeles. He visited the Seamans in 1906 and decided to stay in California. Weston’s brother-in-law found him work as a surveyor’s helper. With his earnings, Weston bought a postcard camera and earned some extra money, often photographing the funerals of young immigrant children. Weston’s spare time was also occupied by a budding romance with his sister’s friend, Flora May Chandler. Concerned about his prospects as a breadwinner, Weston returned to Chicago to attend the Illinois College of Photography. He studied there for almost a year, learning the techniques of portrait photography. Uninspired by the college, Weston left Chicago without graduating. He and Flora were married in January 1909 and their first son, Edward Chandler, was born the following year. Flora bore him three more sons: Theodore Brett in 1911, Neil in 1914 and Cole in 1919.
To support his growing family, Weston worked as an assistant in portrait studios. He soon built his own photographic studio in 1911 on land in Tropico owned by Flora’s family, who had extensive real estate holdings.
For Weston, the work of portrait photography was tedious – especially the delicate retouching expected by patrons – and largely artistically unrewarding. Over the next few years, however, success began to blossom as Weston persisted in submitting artistic photographs to publications and competitions. His soft-focus, pictorialist work was included in a handful of exhibitions and he received many accolades and awards, including election to the London Salon of Photography in 1917. Weston also began to publish articles in photographic magazines, focusing mainly on aesthetics.
The circle of artists who would populate Weston’s world and help shape his aesthetic began to take form. In 1912, Weston met Margarethe Mather, who modelled for him and became his student and later partner in the Tropico studio. In 1917 Weston met another photographer, Johan Hagemeyer, and the two quickly became close friends. Hagemeyer lived with the Weston family for a short time, perhaps a sign of the growing distance between Edward and Flora, who was not part of her husband’s social circle. It was through the dancer Ramiel McGehee that Weston met Tina Modotti in 1921. Weston was immediately smitten with the Italian-born silent film star and model. They soon became lovers. Weston’s circle now included Modotti and her husband, Roubaix ”Robo” de l’Abrie Richey. When de Richey went to Mexico in 1922, he arranged an exhibition of works by American artists and photographers, including Weston, with the head of the Fine Arts Department at the Academia de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. De Richey hoped that both Weston and Modotti would join him in Mexico. Modotti was preparing to leave for Mexico City when she received the news that her husband had contracted cholera. He died before she arrived in Mexico. Despite her husband’s death, Modotti decided to stay in Mexico. She brought 100 of Weston’s prints with her, some of which made up a solo exhibition at the Academia de Bellas Artes. Weston’s work was received with great enthusiasm by the public.
In October 1922, Weston set off on a trip east. He visited his sister May and her family at their new home in Ohio. It was there that Weston took his first industrial landscapes, marking a significant departure from the pictorialism that had previously dominated his work. The industrial, modern city demanded a new kind of photograph, one that was sharply focused. At the ARMCO factory, he stood below the mills, pointing his camera upwards so that the huge chimneys of the mill towered above the lens, giving a sense of their enormity. The ARMCO photographs marked Weston’s first step into modernism.
Travelling on to New York City, Weston met Alfred Stieglitz. It was a somewhat disappointing interview with the great founder of Camera Work, which had been so important to Weston’s development as a photographer. Weston wrote in his Daybook, the diary he kept for many years: “I took my work to show Stieglitz. He opened it up to attack and then threw out print after print, prints I loved. But I am happy, for I have gained strength, indeed I have strengthened my own opinion […] But I feel I was well received by Stieglitz; I could feel his interest and he gave me some praise”.
After visiting his family in Chicago, Weston returned to California in time for Christmas. Modotti had returned from Mexico and their affair was resumed with great passion. During the first half of 1923, Weston took 11 nudes of Margarethe Mather. These photographs mark another important development in Weston’s work. The images are concerned not only with the nude form but also with the juxtaposition of the body with its surroundings – sand, wood, shadow. The rigour of these nudes also marks a real break with pictorialism. Seeking a new environment for his new artistic endeavours, Weston made a decision that would change his life and expand his work as a photographer.
On 30 July 1923, Weston, Tina Modotti and Weston’s 13-year-old son Chandler boarded the SS Colima for Mazatlan, Mexico. Weston and Modotti had an agreement: she would act as a translator and he would teach her photography.
In Mexico, Weston began to accept photography in purely aesthetic terms, continuing his move away from pictorialism. Textures, surfaces and the play of light became increasingly important, and his subject matter broadened. Nudes of Modotti, portraits of important friends and photographs of city life dominate this period. Weston met the painter Diego Rivera and other artists of the Mexican Renaissance, who welcomed him and praised his work. In October 1923, an exhibition of 100 of Weston’s photographs opened at the Aztec Land Gallery in Mexico City to rave reviews from the press and the public.
“I have done what I expected to do, create a sensation in Mexico City”, Weston wrote in his diary. I have never had such an intense and understanding appreciation. This appreciation was a mainstay of Weston’s experience in Mexico, where he lived until the end of 1926, except for a six-month respite in California in 1925.
Returning to California permanently in 1927, Weston began an intense study of organic subjects, focusing primarily on fruits and vegetables and shells, isolated and in sharp focus. This subject matter is one of the hallmarks of Weston’s work, along with his female nudes and Californian landscapes.
It was the form itself, not the objects, that Weston found compelling. He sent prints to Modotti in Mexico and she showed them to some of her friends in the art world. All were struck by the sensuality of the photographs, which evoked a strong physical response. Between 1929 and 1930, Weston made 43 pictures of peppers and his first landscapes in Point Lobos, California.
It was a particularly fruitful period for Weston, who maintained a Spartan lifestyle in order to devote as much time as possible to photography.
Weston’s reputation grew. Between 1930 and 1932 he had more than 30 exhibitions, most notably his first solo show at the Delphic Gallery in New York City.
The first monograph of his work, The Art of Edward Weston, was published in 1932, largely through the efforts of impresario Merle Armitage. The short-lived f/64 group was formed in 1932 and included Weston, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke and Weston’s protégé Sonya Noskowiak. The name of the group is derived from the aperture setting of the lens, which allowed for maximum detail in both foreground and background.
The principles of Group f/64 were based on Weston’s purist doctrine that the final image of a photograph is imagined at the moment of its creation. Weston only made contact prints and never resized, retouched or manipulated an image.
Weston met Charis Wilson in 1934 in Carmel, California, where he had a portrait studio and sold his prints. His first subjects in Carmel were mainly seascapes, trees and rocks, then the surrounding cliffs. These naturalistic photographs – which include some of Weston’s best-known images – set him apart from other photographers who embraced modernism and chose the cityscape as their primary subject. Faced with declining sales during the Depression, Weston closed his Carmel studio the following year and accepted a position with the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) Federal Art Project. The new post took Weston to Santa Monica, and Wilson soon joined him there, setting up house together.
Weston was the first photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1937 he received a one-year grant of 2,000 dollars to continue his series of photographs of the West. For the first time in his life, Weston was able to make a living from artistic photography rather than the portraiture that had been his mainstay.
Phil Hanna, the editor of Westways, the magazine of the Southern California Auto Club, helped organise the itinerary for the Guggenheim trips. Weston and Wilson signed a contract with Westways for eight to ten Weston prints in each monthly issue, with captions by Wilson. The Guggenheim trips took Weston and Wilson all over California, including a trip to Yosemite National Park with Ansel Adams.
Weston was awarded a second Guggenheim Fellowship in 1938. With the financial support of the fellowship, Weston began in 1939 to prepare 100 prints for an installation at the Huntington Library near Pasadena, California. Edward Weston and Charis Wilson, already long-time collaborators, married in 1939 following Weston’s divorce from Flora. California and the West, the book resulting from the Guggenheim travels, was published in 1940.
The Limited Editions Club commissioned Weston to illustrate an edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and in 1941 Weston and Wilson began travelling through 38 US states to photograph for the book. Their travels were cut short by World War II, and they settled at Wildcat Hill, a house in Carmel built by Weston’s son Neil. Weston would live out his years at Wildcat Hill, succumbing to the ravages of Parkinson’s disease. Weston took his last photograph, Eroded Rocks, South Shore, Point Lobos, in 1948. Although his motor skills were affected by Parkinson’s, Weston continued to work, printing negatives with the help of his son Brett.
The last decade of Weston’s life saw a major retrospective in Paris in 1950 and The World of Edward Weston, organised by Beaumont and Nancy Newhall for the Smithsonian Institution.
Weston died at his home on 1 January 1958. He remains an icon in the world of photography and has had several significant posthumous exhibitions, including a 1995 exhibition at the University of California at Riverside/California Museum of Photography that compared his photographs with those of Robert Mapplethorpe.