Read more
"The flame started first by amazement over subject matter, that flame which only a great artist can have-not the emotional pleasure of the layman-but the intuitive understanding and recognition relating obvious reality to the esoteric, must then be confined to a form within which it can burn with a focused intensity: otherwise it flares, smokes, and is lost in an open bonfire." -Edward Weston, Carmel, California, April 7, 1930
About the author
Edward Weston began to earn an international reputation for his portrait work in 1911. From 1923 to 1926 he worked in Mexico and California, where he lived with his sons, turning increasingly to subjects such as nudes, clouds, and close-ups of rocks, trees, vegetables, and shells. On a Guggenheim Fellowship from 1937 to 1939, he photographed throughout the American West. In 1948 Weston made his last photograph; he had been stricken with Parkinson’s disease several years earlier.Nancy Newhall was a photo historian, writer, and acting curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 1942 to 1946, where she organized a major retrospective of Weston’s work. She helped cofound Aperture in 1952.Photographer and environmentalist Ansel Adams was a founding member of Aperture and the famed Group f/64.
Summary
This classic monograph, first issued as a hardcover in 1965, began its life in 1958 as a monographic issue of Aperture magazine published in celebration of Weston's life. Drawing on a decades-long collaboration between the photographer and Nancy Newhall, Aperture cofounder and early MoMA curator, this volume brings together a sequence of images and excerpts from Weston's writing in an effort to channel the photographer's creativity and, in his own words, present clearly my feeling for life with photographic beauty…without subterfuge or evasion in spirit or technique.
Now, 50 years later, Aperture presents a reissue of this volume, which covers the range of Weston's greatest works, from the portraits and nudes to the landscapes and still-lifes. Accompanying and amplifying the images are Weston's own thoughts, excerpted from his now-famed daybooks and letters. Others who contributed to the making of the book include two of the artist's sons, Brett and Cole, and two other Aperture cofounders, filmmaker and author Dody Warren Weston and Ansel Adams, whose preface offers a posthumous tribute to the oeuvre of a remarkable artist. A brief bibliography as well as a chronology offer further insight into the life and work of this giant of twentieth-century photography.
Additional text
It comes as quite a shock to see pictures that aspire so unabashedly to high art, that are so conspicuously beautiful, as Edward Weston’s nudes.
–The New York Times
Connoisseur of the sensual
–The New York Times
As Edward Weston: Portraits shows, Weston didn't just photograph women, he exposed them. They fill the frame, they spill over it; their bodies are cropped so that discrete parts—legs, feet, and buttocks, the curve of ribs and breast—become the entire subject. It's as though the lens, and the photographer behind it, were touching and caressing them.
–Vogue
