EDWARD WESTON THE FLAME OF RECOGNITION

Sixty years after its publication, The Flame of Recognition continues to offer unmatched insight into the mind, life, and work of a twentieth-century icon.

This classic monograph, first issued as a hardcover volume in 1965, began its life in 1958 as a monographic issue of Aperture magazine. Drawing on a decades-long collaboration between the photographer and Nancy Newhall, Aperture cofounder and Museum of Modern Art curator, The Flame of Recognition 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.”

In 2015, Aperture reissued the book on its fiftieth anniversary, and ten years later Aperture is pleased to present the sixtieth anniversary edition in an elegant paperback edition. The Flame of Recognition 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 Weston Thompson 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; born in Highland Park, Illinois; died in Carmel, California) began to earn an international reputation for his portrait work in 1911. From 1923 to 1926 he turned increasingly to subjects such as nudes, clouds, and close-ups of rocks, trees, vegetables, and shells. Weston was a founding member of Group f/64, best known for their use of the large-format view camera, small-lens aperture, and contact printing, and for the goal of elevating photography to a high art at a time when it was only considered a form of documentation. On a Guggenheim Fellowship from 1937 to 1939, he photographed throughout the American West with Charis Wilson, his writing partner and muse. In 1948, Weston, who had been stricken with Parkinson’s disease several years earlier, made his last photograph. His Daybooks, records of his life as a photographer, were published in the 1960s.

Nancy Newhall was a photo historian, writer, and acting curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 1942 to 1946, where she organized a major retrospective of Weston’s work. She helped cofound Aperture in 1952.

Ansel Adams was an iconic American photographer and environmentalist known for his awe-inspiring black-and-white photographs of the American West. Adams was a cofounder of Group f/64 and Aperture.