Museum Exhibition Catalogues, Monographs, Artist's Projects, Curatorial Writings and Essays
Edward Weston was born in 1886 in Highland Park, Illinois, outside of Chicago. One of photography's most widely exhibited and collected photographers, he began his career as a door-to-door portrait photographer in California in 1906. After having lived in Mexico City in the early 20s, where he ran a studio with apprentice and lover Tina Modotti, he returned to California permanently and began the work for which he is most famous: natural form close-ups, nudes and landscapes. Weston died in 1958 in Carmel.
Published by MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Text by Karen E. Haas, Margaret Wessling.
This is a book about Edward Weston before he was Edward Weston—before he was the renowned modernist photographer we know so well. His early years in the field coincided exactly with the height of the Pictorialist movement in America, and while he was never a typical practitioner, he did make photographs that borrowed themes from paintings and other media, and experimented with soft-focused imagery that sometimes looks more like graphite drawings or inky dark prints than photographs. He would later disavow the gauzy, painterly experiments of his early years, claiming in his Daybooks that “even as I made the soft ‘artistic’ work … I would secretly admire sharp, clean, technically perfect photographs.”
Introducing rare surviving prints from the unplumbed holdings of the Lane Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, this book offers new insights into Weston’s working methods and his evolution as a photographer. By taking a longer and more nuanced view of his early years, and by reinserting his first experiments back into the larger story of his artistic production, it reveals the variety of ways in which the paths he took as a young man led him to become the mature modernist master. Beautifully reproduced examples of Weston’s most important early work, essays explaining its place in his oeuvre and the history of photography, and a section dedicated to the variety of Weston’s early materials and techniques make this book a must-have resource.
Published by Aperture. Edited with foreword by Nancy Newhall. Preface by Ansel Adams.
This classic monograph, first issued as a hardcover in 1965, began its life in 1958 as a monographic issue of Aperture magazine published in celebration of Weston's life. Drawing on a decades-long collaboration between the photographer and Nancy Newhall, Aperture cofounder and early MoMA curator, this volume brings together a sequence of images and excerpts from Weston's writing in an effort to channel the photographer's creativity and, in his own words, "present clearly my feeling for life with photographic beauty ... without subterfuge or evasion in spirit or technique." Now, 50 years later, Aperture presents a reissue of this volume, which covers the range of Weston's greatest works, from the portraits and nudes to the landscapes and still-lifes. Accompanying and amplifying the images are Weston's own thoughts, excerpted from his now-famed daybooks and letters. Others who contributed to the making of the book include two of the artist's sons, Brett and Cole, and two other Aperture cofounders, filmmaker and author Dody Warren Weston and Ansel Adams, whose preface offers a posthumous tribute to the oeuvre of a remarkable artist. A brief bibliography as well as a chronology offer further insight into the life and work of this giant of twentieth-century photography. Edward Weston (1886–1958) began to earn an international reputation for his portrait work around 1911, 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. From 1923 to 1926 he worked in Mexico and California, where he lived with his sons, turning increasingly to subjects such as nudes, clouds and close-ups of rocks, trees, vegetables and shells. On a Guggenheim Fellowship from 1937 to 1939, he photographed throughout the American West. In 1948 Weston made his last photograph; he had been stricken with Parkinson's disease several years earlier.
PUBLISHER Aperture
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 8.25 x 9.75 in. / 112 pgs / 64 duotone.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 5/26/2015 No longer our product
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PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781597113106TRADE List Price: $45.00 CDN $55.00
Published by La Fábrica/Fundación Banco Santander. Edited with text by Laura González Flores.
This book compares the portrait photographs of two American masters, Harry Callahan (1912–1999) and Edward Weston (1886–1958), examining how their images combine desire and affection. While many of their well-known works have been understood as straightforward nudes or landscapes, this book looks beyond the limitations of these categories to suggest a more complex notion of their erotic photography. He, She, It looks at Callahan and Weston’s images through an examination of the relationship of the body and nature, but also, that of photography and affection. Unlike the majority of erotic photography that seeks to represent desire, in both Callahan and Weston we find the rare instance of desire wholly transformed into an image--an image where the subject is clearly not just displayed but the affection of the photographers toward the subject is clearly evident. For this to occur, there must be complicity between the photographer and his model. It’s clear that these are not anonymous and interchangeable models in these images but women whose bodies are evidently loved by the photographers: Tina and Charis in the case of Weston, and Eleanor in the case of Callahan. This emphasis makes this selection of photographs all the more intimate, and all the more deeply erotic.
From nudes to landscapes, a wide-ranging retrospective of the work of Edward Weston, one of the greatest twentieth-century American photographers. This gorgeous volume shows the work of one of the major twentieth-century artists whose output has influenced the very conception of photography for generations to come. After abandoning pictorial photography, Weston turned his interest in the direction of realism, developing his own original style based on the quest for a pure form to express his contemporary world. He believed that the world around him, whether it be the face of a woman, a place, or a vegetable, did not require special devices to be recorded: in fact, he felt that it is inside the mind that things become proud-looking sculptures, objects that seem to come to life on their own. This thoughtful selection of 110 photographs is an eloquent testimony to Weston’s teachings, bearing witness to the experiences that contributed to making him the artist he was: from his interest in modernism and cubism to his years in Mexico, where he shared the echoes of European surrealism with the local artists; from his decision to move to Point Lobos, a location that was of crucial importance to the development of his vision of the landscape, to his intense relationships with women who were his muses and companions in his everyday life as well as in his photography.
Filippo Maggia is currently researcher at the Photography Department of the Royal College of Art. Since 2010, he has taught photographic documentation at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Catania. Among his previous titles published by Skira are Araki Gold (2008), New Photography in Britain (2008), Daido Moriyama (2010), and Yasuzo Nojima (2011).
Edward Weston was born in Highland Park, Illinois, in 1886, and began his career as a door-to-door portrait photographer in 1906. After a spell in Mexico City during the early 1920s--where he ran a studio with Tina Modotti--he moved to California and commenced the work for which he is most famous: close-ups of nature, nudes and landscapes. This volume celebrates Weston's nudes, of which Hilton Kramer wrote: “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.”
PUBLISHER Aperture
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 9.5 x 11.5 in. / 118 pgs / 60 reproductions throughout.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 6/15/2005 No longer our product
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PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780893810207TRADE List Price: $40.00 CDN $50.00
Published by Aperture. Foreward by Beaumont Newhall.
For more than 15 years, Edward Weston kept a diary in which he recorded his struggle to understand himself, his society and his art. His journal has become a classic of photographic literature. Weston was a towering figure in twentieth-century photography, whose restless quest for beauty and the mystical presence behind it resulted in a body of work unrivaled in the medium. John Szarkowski observes that “It was as though the things of everyday experience had been transformed... into organic sculptures, the forms of which were both the expression and the justification of the life within... He had freed his eyes of conventional expectation, and had taught them to see the statement of intent that resides in natural form.”
PUBLISHER Aperture
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 6.25 x 9.25 in. / 310 pgs / 73 reproductions throughout.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 6/15/2005 No longer our product
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PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780893814458TRADE List Price: $29.95 CDN $35.00
Edward Weston was born in Highland Park, Illinois, in 1886, and began his career as a door-to-door portrait photographer in 1906. After a spell in Mexico City during the early 1920s--where he ran a studio with Tina Modotti--he moved to California and commenced the work for which he is most famous: close-ups of nature, nudes and landscapes. This volume celebrates Weston's nudes, of which Hilton Kramer wrote: “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.”
PUBLISHER Aperture
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 9.5 x 11.5 in. / 118 pgs / 60 reproductions throughout.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 6/15/2005 No longer our product
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PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780893815325TRADE List Price: $27.50 CDN $32.50
Published by Aperture. Edited and foreward by Nancy Newhall.
This book offers the reader, collector and student of photography an extraordinary opportunity to study a representative body of Weston's life-work. --The New York Times Integrating revealing excerpts from Edward Weston's daybooks and letters with some of his most exquisite photographs, Nancy Newhall sheds light on Weston's attempts to ìunderstand the strange flashes of vision that came through his camera.
PUBLISHER Aperture
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 8.5 x 9.75 in. / 104 pgs / 71 reproductions throughout.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 6/15/2005 No longer our product
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PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780893815332TRADE List Price: $27.50 CDN $32.50
Published by Aperture. Photographs by Edward Weston. Text by Susan Morgan, Cole Weston.
This monograph is the first published collection of Edward Weston's finest portraits. It shows the artist at this most inspired: vigorously rendering “the very substance, the deeper inner image” of sons, lovers, friends and fellow artists, with such immediacy that they linger in our mind's eye long after viewing. In his lifetime, Weston's photographs were first published in Aperture in 1952. In 1958, upon Weston's death, Nancy Newhall brought his pictures together in a single landmark issue that became known as “The Flame of Recognition.”
PUBLISHER Aperture
BOOK FORMAT Paperback, 11.5 x 9.75 in. / 96 pgs / 73 duotone.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 6/15/2005 No longer our product
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PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780893816476TRADE List Price: $18.50 CDN $20.00
Published by Aperture. Photographs by Edward Weston.
A towering figure in twentieth-century photography, Edward Weston sought to lead viewers to “see through their eyes, not with them.” His restless quest for beauty and the mystical presence behind it created a body of work unrivaled in the medium. This book offers Weston masterpieces spanning more than four decades. Included are his early Pictorialist images, industrial studies of Armco Steel, portraits from his Mexican period, the still lifes and landscapes of the 1930s and the sometimes acerbic images of the later years. R.H. Cravens's essay draws upon Weston's writings and recollections by sons, lovers and friends. What emerges is the profile of “a thoroughly American genius--courageous, pure, troubled, unorthodox and utterly sure of its purpose.”
PUBLISHER Aperture
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 8 x 8 in. / 96 pgs / 46 reproductions throughout.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 6/15/2005 No longer our product
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PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780893817473TRADE List Price: $12.50 CDN $15.00
Published by Wild Horse Island Press. Essays by Kurt Markus, Charis Wilson and John Woods.
Dune collects, for the first time, the sand dune photographs of both Edward and Brett Weston, two giant names in modern photography. Previously, their remarkable dune photographs--dramatic abstractions of light and shadow and sensuous shape--were featured as samples in overview publications on the artists, just a picture here and there. This lush volume brings together father and son in a personal, unique fashion, showcasing the photographs each made in the same locations. Adding depth is an original essay by Brett Weston's longtime friend, traveling companion and biographer, John Charles Woods. Woods' intimate, forthcoming narrative describes what it was like to accompany the younger Weston into the dunes and what his habits and personality were like. Charis Wilson, Edward Weston's one-time wife, excerpts a passage from her acclaimed book Through Another Lens, in which she tells of a 1936 trip she and her husband made to the dunes of Oceano, California. Also included are correspondence between father and son, and excerpts from Edward Weston's daybooks.
PUBLISHER
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 12.75 x 10 in. / 96 pgs / 60 tritone
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 8/2/2003 Out of print
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2003
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780967732121TRADE List Price: $65.00 CDN $75.00
Published by The Art Institute of Chicago. Essay by David Travis. Foreword by James N. Wood.
This book appears in conjunction with an exhibition organized by The Art Institute of Chicago that focuses on the late work of photographer Edward Weston. Taken between1938 and 1948, these images reveal his shift from his formalist style, characterized by technological virtuosity and innovative compositions, to one that accommodated a greater psychological component. The first photographs of this period date from Weston's return to his spiritual home near Carmel, California, during his second Guggenheim fellowship. He now saw the surrounding coast with different eyes: while he had once focused on details and still lifes, he now found himself drawn to vistas, horizons, the movement of water, and moody atmospheres of elemental power. The seventy-plus photographs in this book, sumptuously printed in tritone reproductions, include--in addition to his images of nature--Weston's powerful portraits of his immediate family, as well as domestic scenes taken in and around his home. Also included is a critical essay exploring Weston's life and work during this period, by David Travis, Curator of Photography at the Art Institute and a longtime specialist in the career of Edward Weston.
PUBLISHER The Art Institute of Chicago
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 10.5 x 11.5 in. / 144 pgs / 25 duotone / 75 tritone
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 6/2/2001 No longer our product
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2001
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9780865591929TRADE List Price: $45.00 CDN $55.00
Edward Weston: The Flame of Recognition
Edward Weston & Harry Callahan: He, She, It
Edward Weston
Edward Weston: The Last Years In Carmel