Product Description

This book appears in conjunction with an exhibition organized by The Art Institute of Chicago that focuses on the late work of photographer Edward Weston. Taken between1938 and 1948, these images reveal his shift from his formalist style, characterized by technological virtuosity and innovative compositions, to one that accommodated a greater psychological component. The first photographs of this period date from Weston's return to his spiritual home near Carmel, California, during his second Guggenheim fellowship. He now saw the surrounding coast with different eyes: while he had once focused on details and still lifes, he now found himself drawn to vistas, horizons, the movement of water, and moody atmospheres of elemental power. The seventy-plus photographs in this book, sumptuously printed in tritone reproductions, include--in addition to his images of nature--Weston's powerful portraits of his immediate family, as well as domestic scenes taken in and around his home. Also included is a critical essay exploring Weston's life and work during this period, by David Travis, Curator of Photography at the Art Institute and a longtime specialist in the career of Edward Weston.
Hardcover, 10.5 x 11.5 inches, 144 pages, 100 tritone illustrations.
Exhibition Schedule: Art Institute of Chicago, June-October 2001; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, March-June 2002.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1576219 in Books
• Published on: 2001-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 144 pages

From Library Journal
During the last period of Edward Weston's work, roughly 1938 through 1948, he began to feel the effects of aging and of Parkinson's disease. He had returned to Carmel and Point Lobos, a place that had been the source of many of his most famous images. His (second) marriage to the much younger Charis Wilson was failing, his sons were serving in a war that closed Point Lobos for a time to Weston's photographic forays, and he was battling symptoms of depression, undiagnosed at the time. All contributed to a significant change in his photographic vision. His last landscape images were psychologically darker and less formalistic than those produced earlier in Carmel, and his nudes featuring Wilson were also more somber. After 1948, Weston stopped taking photographs but continued hosting friends and students until his death on New Year's Day, 1958. This is the first book to examine Weston's last body of work, so different from the images that made him famous. Travis, curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, demonstrates his considerable skill with this series of chronologically organized essays and 108 reproductions, published to accompany a traveling exhibit. The illustrations are excellent, as are the essays. Recommended for fine art and photography collections. Kathleen Collins, Bank of America Corporate Archives, San Francisco
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
Edward Weston was born in 1886 in Highland Park, Illinois, and had his first photographs exhibited at the Chicago Art Institute at the age of seventeen. In 1906 he began living and working in San Francisco, and he would spend most of his time in California thereafter, becoming a founding member of the California Pictorialists of Los Angeles in 1908. Towards the 1920s Weston began to work with the Mexican-based photographer Tina Modotti, and renounced Pictorialism. In 1932 he became a charter member of the "Group f/64" that included Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Consuelo Kanaga and others. Weston continued working even after being diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1946. Edward Weston died at home in 1958.

"I have written of photography as 'direct, honest, uncompromising,' - and so it is when used in its purity, if the worker himself is equally sincere and understanding in selection and presentation. Then it has a power and vitality which moves and holds the spectator. There can be no lie in such photography. No human hand of possible frailty has in the recording lessened its pristine beauty, nor misrepresented its meaning, destroying significance." -Edward Weston