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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 photography, although he did not complete the program. He returned to California in 1909, found work as a retoucher in a Los Angeles studio, and married. In 1911 he built and opened his own studio in Tropico (now Glendale), California, and soon became a successful commercial photographer. At the same time, Weston began to acquire a substantial reputation for his personal work, which he exhibited in photographic salons in the United States and abroad, culminating in his election in 1917 to the prestigious London Salon. By this time, however, Weston may have already begun to question the direction and significance of the pictorialist aesthetic that so informed his photographs of this period.
Pictorialism dominated the art photography movement from the late 1890s into the early 1920s. Rooted in the premise that photographs had to look more like drawings or paintings to be accepted as works of
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