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Edward Weston: Rediscovery Through the Lens
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14573 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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5 / 1988 |
1,980 Words |
| Author
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William F. Stapp
William F. Stapp is curator of photographs at the National
Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. |
Edward Weston, indisputably one of the monumental figures of American photography, would have been one hundred years old in 1986. His centenary was celebrated with several important museum exhibitions, all of which served to reaffirm Weston's distinctive significance as a photographer and one of the major American artists of this century. Although his name is perhaps less familiar to today's general public than that of his younger friend Ansel Adams, whom he influenced, Weston created photographs that are deservedly among the immutably icons of modern photography. He is surely as pivotal a figure in the self-conscious evolution of the medium as an art form as Alfred Stieglitz, his elder contemporary and photography's most ardent advocate in the formative decades of the present era.
Edward Henry Weston was born in Highland Park, Illinois, on March 14, 1886. He was the son of a physician and, although indifferent to schooling, seemed destined for a conventional middle-class businessman's life. His father's gift to him of a simple box camera at the age of sixteen, however, determined Weston's future: He became an ardent amateur photographer, quickly graduated to a considerably more sophisticated 5 x 7-view camera, and began to submit his work--successfully--to amateur photographic salons and publications. In 1906, he decided to move to California and make his living as a professional photographer.
Only Formal Training
After two years of working there as an itinerant photographer, traveling door-to-door taking portraits, Weston returned to Chicago and enrolled in the Illinois College of Photography. This was Weston's only formal training in
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