Edward Weston, the pure form
« American photographer (1886-1958), who elevated everyday objects — a pepper, a shell — to pure abstraction. »
Edward Weston abandoned his early pictorialist style in the mid-1920s, under the influence of post-revolutionary Mexico and his encounter with Tina Modotti. He found a new clarity: photograph what is, without dressing it up. Pepper No. 30 (1930) and Nautilus (1927) became manifestos.
In 1932 he co-founded the f/64 group with Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham. The name is the smallest aperture on his lens — absolute sharpness from front to back. All his photographs were made on an 8x10 view camera, on a tripod, and contact-printed without enlargement.
The first photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship (1937), Weston photographed Death Valley, Point Lobos, Carmel. Stricken with Parkinson's disease in the 1940s, he continued to supervise the prints his sons Brett and Cole made from his negatives until his death.