Edward Weston: Portraits - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0893816051 ISBN 13: 9780893816056

Publisher: Aperture, 2005

Synopsis

Weston spent the greatest part of his towering career setting a standard of photographic portraiture. Included are images of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Tina Modotti, and James Cagney. Together these photographs create a powerful volume that demands a fresh look at this central endeavor of his life's work.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Edward Weston Portraits is the first published collection of Edward Weston's most revealing portraits and shows the artist at his most inspired: "rendering the very substance, the deeper inner image" of sons, lovers, friends, and fellow artists with such commanding immediacy that they linger in the mind's eye long after viewing. Weston seized the photographic moment through a shrewd and unusual technique: by only pretending to shoot film for a period of time before actually taking the photograph, and then flashing the lens cap without the subjects' knowing, he cleverly guided them beyond "the pose", even allowing his sitters to wander freely about the studio. From the smoldering intensity on the face of Mexican painter Jose Clemete Orozco to the beguilingly sensual elegance achieved in nude depictions of Charis Wilson - Weston's greatest sitter and most enduring love - the photographer again and again transformed the realistic into the immanently mystical. Encompassing 72 duotone prints, Edward Weston Portraits treats its subject with the care and respect that Weston did his: on equal terms. A foreword by Cole Weston and a biographical essay by Susan Morgan, correspondence from Weston's lifelong friends, and excerpted texts from his daybooks all enhance and deepen our understanding of the photographs. A new window on Edward Weston's supreme talent, a documentary glimpse of his extraordinary circle of acquaintances, and a paradigm of photographic portaiture. Edward Weston Portraits evinces what Robinson Jeffers called "unmeasured power, incredible passion, enormous craft".

About the Author:

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 cutshort 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Aperture
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0893816051
• ISBN 13: 9780893816056
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96