Edward Weston: Nudes

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Edward Weston: Nudes Details

Review "To Weston's eye...the landscape of the human body was an unending revelation of forms both voluptuous and abstract. His genius as an artist lay in his ability to respond to both with equal passion."--Hilton Kramer, The New York Times"It was as though the things of everyday experience had been transformed for Weston into organic sculptures, the forms of which were both the expression and justification of the life within. The exhilarating visual purity of Weston's work is the product of a deeper achievement: He had freed his eyes of conventional expectation, and had taught them to see the statement of intent that resides in natural form."--John Szarkowski, Looking at Photographs"Edward Weston understood thoughts and concepts which dwell on simple mystical levels. His work-- direct and honest as it is-- leaped from a deep intuition and belief in the forces beyond the apparent and factual. He accepted these forces as completely real and part of the total world of man and nature, only a small portion of which most of us experience directly....And it was Weston who accomplished more than anyone, with the possible exception of Alfred Stieglitz, to elevate photography to the status of fine-art expression."--Ansel Adams Read more About the Author The daughter of Harry Leon Wilson, a popular novelist of the 1920s, Charis Wilson was born in San Francisco on May 5, 1914, and grew up in Carmel. There she met Edward Weston in 1934 and offered to pose for him. For the next ten years, she was Weston's model-- posing for approximately half of all his recorded nudes-- as well as his lover (they were married in 1939). In 1936 Wilson urged Weston to apply for a Guggenheim fellowship, took his original four-line application and turned it into four pages, and helped him become the first photographer ever to win the award. Wilson described the Guggenheim travels in California and the West, published in 1940.Edward Weston was born March 24, 1886, in Highland Park, Illinois. He made his first photographs in 1902 with a Kodak Bull's Eye #2 camera-- a gift from his father. In 1911, five years after moving to California, he opened his own portrait studio in Tropico (now Glendale), California, and began to earn an international reputation for his work. But it was not until 1922 that he came fully into his own as an artist, with his photographs of the Armco Steel mill in Ohio. During 1923-26 he worked in Mexico and in California, where he lived with his sons, Chandler, Brett, Neil, and Cole. Though he continued to support himself with portrait work, Weston turned increasingly to subjects of his own choosing, such as nudes, clouds, and close-ups of rocks, trees, vegetables, and shells. During 1937-39, on a Guggenheim Fellowship, he traveled and photographed throughout the American West. Three years later, he toured the South and East, taking photographs for a limited edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, until the attack on Pearl Harbor cut short his journey. In 1948 Weston made his last photograph; he had been stricken with Parkinson's disease several years earlier. On January 1, 1958, he died at Wildcat Hill, his home in Carmel, California. Read more

Reviews

I've loved these images for more than 50 years; they are iconic in the 20th century photographic canon. To buy one of the original prints is, quite simply, beyond my purse, but thankfully this 1977 book reproduces the images with the care and respect that Aperture characteristically brings to its monographs. This is the third copy I've bought over the years; one stayed with a previous partner, and a second was given away as a gift, so I've bought another copy. Almost none of Weston's plates have been reproduced as decent-quality unlimited prints, so this Aperture monograph is as good as most of us will see, unless we're standing in front of one of the photographic prints in a museum exhibition.

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