Edward Weston
(1886-1958)
Edward Weston is considered one of the most influential photographic artists of the 20th century. His straight- forward approach to the medium, along with his simple methodology serves as an example that the art of the medium is in how one sees their subject – to photograph everyday things in ways that we haven’t seen before. His mastery of vision and technique has provided us with some of the most beautiful examples of 8 x 10” contact prints that have ever been created in the photographic medium.
In her forward to the 1965 Edward Weston Monograph, The Flame of Recognition, Nancy Newhall wrote, “In photography he had to find his way alone, first because as a boy he was too shy to ask and later because, when the fashionable attitudes and easy successes were behind him, the only photographers who would have understood him, were, so far as he knew, 3,000 miles away on the East Coast. He did see them once, briefly on a journey to New York City in 1922. The rest of the years he wrestled alone with his medium and himself. … Films were slow in those days and exposures long; his old 8 x 10 was rickety and his bellows often leaked. And to the last, he trusted his own feeling for light more than any photoelectric meter. Deliberately he stripped his technique, his living, and seeing of unessentials and tried to concentrate on the objective and eternal – only to find that he could not and would not be bound even by his own dogma. How could he tell what he would see on his ground glass tomorrow?”