Edward weston photography style

/ This then: to photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock.

Edward Weston was a master of making the simple look profound.

At first, he worked as a freelancer, taking photos of families and their pets by going door to door. 

He eventually realized that he would require proper instruction and attended the Illinois College of Photography in 1908, where he completed the course in only six months.

Early Period

Edward Weston learned considerably more about photography while serving as a darkroom assistant and subsequently as a photographer in the Los Angeles portraiture studios of Louis Mojonier and George Steckel.

Common among Weston's work at the time, his cropping and dramatic lighting create a high contrast image that encourages focus on the fleshy bumps and curves of the female form. Had he still been publishing his magazine Camera Work at the time, he told Weston, he would have published these smoke stacks in it. In Mexico, the artist created 750 photos of subjects that varied from the desert landscape and ordinary household fixtures to portraits of Modotti and political activists he met through her, such as Guadalupe de Rivera (Diego Rivera's wife at the time).

Weston's time in Mexico was also a time of reflection and self-examination.

Because it best articulated the modernist tenet 'form follows function,' the toilet, according to artist Margaret Morgan, became the "grand signifier of 20^th-century Modernism." For Weston, this image also foreshadows his series of high resolution, close-up photos of organic objects that he commenced upon leaving Mexico later that year.

Gelatin Silver Print - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

1927

Knees

Weston began photographing nudes - his largest series of close-up organic forms - in the early 1920s and continued over the next twenty years.

Impressed by both Paul Strand and Alfred Stieglitz’s finely focused photographs of meticulously cropped modern subjects, Weston traveled to Ohio, the new home of his sister Mary, and shot his iconic shots of the Armco Steel Works. Modernist (or “Straight”) photography was characterised by the use of a large format camera to create richly detailed and sharply focused black and white photographs.

Tomato Field, Monterey Coast is a quintessential example of this. This studio functioned as a portrait photography company and served as the artist’s headquarters for the following two decades. Even after their divorce nine years later, he continued to reside in a small wooden cabin on Wildcat Hill.

When four years later the magazine Camera and Darkroom published his photograph Spring, Chicago in a full-page spread, Weston left Illinois to join his sister Mary, then living in Tropico, California, with her family, to cultivate a career in photography.

Upon arriving in California, nineteen-year-old Weston, with his sister's encouragement, began work as a freelance photographer.

She has since worked and collaborated with various professionals in the local art industry, including the KZNSA Gallery in Durban (with Strauss & Co.), Turbine Art Fair (via overheard in the gallery), and the Wits Art Museum.

Anthony’s interests include subjects and themes related to philosophy, memory, and esotericism. In 1946, The Museum of Modern Art featured a retrospective of his work, celebrating his expansive career.

Weston emphasizes the plumbing fixture’s sculptural aspect by providing a frontal perspective of the toilet’s base, its curves replicated in the patterned tiles beneath. To find out more about this famous photographer, let us take a deeper look at Edward Weston’s biography.

Portrait of Edward Weston (1914) by Rae Davis; Rae Davis, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Childhood and Education

Weston’s mother passed away when he was only five years of age, and her last dying wish was that he one day become a businessman.

The subject’s purpose remains obvious, but this new perspective underlines the profane object’s surprising artistic refinement, while the commode’s center positioning within the arrangement and dominance of space indicates it is enormous in scale. 

This photograph also foreshadowed Weston’s collection of close-up, hi-resolution photographs of organic items, which he began shortly after departing Mexico.

Knees (1927)

In the early 1920s, Weston started photographing nudes, his biggest collection of close-up natural shapes and continued for the following 20 years.