Edward Weston
American, 1886 - 1958
When Weston dropped out of high school in 1903, a place was secured for him with Marshall Field and Company, where in three years he advanced from errand boy to salesman. But the joys of exploring with his camera and developing and printing his own negatives at home had become his major enthusiasms. In 1906, while visiting his sister in California, Weston decided not to return to Chicago. After working as a railroad surveyor, he bought an old postcard camera to take from door to door, offering his services as an all-purpose family photographer.
To increase his technical competence, Weston attended the Illinois College of Photography in 1908; he finished the course in six months, but a technicality deprived him of a diploma. Returning to southern California, he worked as a printer for other portrait photographers. On Jan. 30, 1909, he married Flora May Chandler, the daughter of a wealthy Los Angeles family. They had four sons: Edward Chandler, Theodore Brett, Laurence Neil, and Cole. The marriage, however, was not always happy.
In 1911 Weston built and opened his own studio, surrounded by a garden, in Tropico (now Glendale), Calif., where his sister and her husband, John H. Seaman, resided. Before long, customers from the Hollywood movie colony began to find their way to his rustic workplace. Through a troubled affair with Margrethe Mather, lasting on and off from about 1912 to 1920, Weston was introduced to the latest, most advanced ideas in all the arts. The period from 1914 to 1917 was one of considerable success as his spontaneous, soft-focus, outdoor portraits of children and dancers won many awards. He gave many demonstrations of his "high-key" techniques and in 1917 was elected to the London Salon, pictorial photography's highest honor.
But growing dissatisfaction with artificiality of any kind led to a profound change of direction in Weston's career. From 1919 to 1921 he sent no work to public exhibitions, and, as part of the process of ridding himself of the romantic overtones and self-conscious aestheticism of the pictorial movement, he destroyed in a bonfire many of his earlier photographs along with three years of entries in his daybook, a kind of diary he had begun to keep in 1917. His new work involved experiments with semiabstract fragments of nudes or natural forms, seen in close-up or taken at unusual angles with an 8 X 10 view camera.
In March 1922 Tina Modotti took some of Weston's new, sharp-focus contact prints to Mexico City, where they were enthusiastically received. In October of that year, Weston went east, stopping to see his sister, who was then living in Ohio, and taking his first industrial photographs of the Armco Steel plant, before going on to New York in November to meet Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Charles Sheeler, the leading exponents of "straight" photography.
In August 1923 Weston went to live in Mexico with Tina Modotti, taking his son Chandler along. He opened a studio first in Tacubaya and then in Mexico City, where he met the leaders of the Mexican Renaissance--including Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco. After several months in 1925, when he shared a studio in San Francisco with his friend, Johan Hagemeyer, Weston went back to Mexico for another year, traveling with Modotti and another son, Brett, while photographing marketplaces, bars, sculpture, landscapes, and clouds. He returned to Glendale in November 1926.
Building on the dramatic power of his Mexican portrait heads and still lifes, Weston began a series of extreme close-up studies of shells and vegetables. Cypress roots, eroded rocks, and twisted seaweed became major themes in his work during the years he shared a studio with Brett in Carmel (1929-1934). He was invited, along with Edward Steichen, to organize the American section of the Deutsche Werkbund "Film und Foto" exhibition held in Stuttgart in 1929; and he was given his first one-man shows in New York (1930) and San Francisco (1931). Together with Ansel Adams and Willard Van Dyck, he was a leading member of the Group f64, an informal association founded in 1932 and disbanded in 1935 that promoted the principles of "pure" photography.
Having turned his attention from small details to larger forms and broader vistas in the early 1930's, Weston made his famous series of nudes and sand dunes at Oceano, Calif., in 1936. The following year he was the first photographer to be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. The $2,000 stipend, renewed in 1938, allowed him to travel throughout the southwest and northwest, making more than 1,500 exposures.
After divorcing his wife, Flora, in 1938, Weston married Charis Wilson on Apr. 24, 1939. They lived in a house, built by his son Neil, on Wildcat Hill in Carmel, not far from Point Lobos, where he began photographing again. A trip through the southern and eastern states to collect photographs for a special edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass was cut short by America's entry into World War II.
In 1946 a major retrospective of Weston's work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Stricken with Parkinson's disease, Weston took his last negative at Point Lobos in 1948. Thereafter he supervised his sons, Brett and Cole, and his darkroom assistant, Dody Warren, as they produced several sets of prints from 1,000 selected negatives. He died in Carmel.
Retrieved from "Edward Henry Weston." Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1980. Gale Biography In Context. Web. 21 Feb. 2012.
http://ic.galegroup.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/ic/bic1/ReferenceDetailsPage/ReferenceDetailsWindow?displayGroupName=Reference&disableHighlighting=false&prodId=BIC1&action=e&windowstate=normal&catId=&documentId=GALE%7CBT2310000909&mode=view&userGroupName=tall85761&jsid=19abea88af7414aa41be12e5e727aa11 (Accessed Feb. 21, 2012)
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