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When Edward Weston's Eye Feasted on His Beloved California
At age 20, Edward Weston, a struggling photographer, moved from Illinois to Southern California, beckoned by his sister, May Seaman. "This is the place for you without an atom of a doubt," she wrote. "Every year you spend back East is so much loss to you. This is the country you have been longing for."
Mrs. Seaman was right. From the moment he settled in California, in 1906, Weston found not only a home but also a landscape that gave him the opportunity to create some of the richest and most sensuous photographic images of the American West ever made. At his death in Carmel in 1958, at 71, after years of not working because of Parkinson's disease, Weston was acclaimed as a pioneering modernist and a master of 20th-century photography.
"Weston's objective was to find beauty in the commonplace, or discover the transcendental qualities in objects that seemed ordinary," said Jennifer Watts, curator of photography at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, near Pasadena, which is offering a major Weston show until Oct. 5.
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Edward Weston
Photography and Modernism
In 1927 a noted critic proclaimed photography "the new art of the twentieth century" and Edward Weston among its few "unquestioned masters." Weston (1886-1958) is best known for his still-lifes of peppers and shells, his heroic portraits, and his abstract close-ups of nudes, rocks, and trees. More than a great photographer, though, Weston was a pioneering modernist, one whose work evolved in response to contemporary movements in all the arts. "Edward Weston: Photography and Modernism" shows the great strength and variety of Weston's mature work from his first experiments with modernism about 1920 until he stopped working in 1948 due to ill health.
Excusado, 1925
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Edward Weston
Edward Weston Online |
