Edward Weston
Edward Weston [1888-1958] is undoubtedly the most important "serious" "fine art" photographer of the 20th Century.Weston's adventurous spirit, his willingness to go beyond traditional, popular notions of image-making, enabled him to pioneer photographic endeavor, and his place in the history of light-sensitive materials will always be preeminent. In many ways, he was the first to see that a photograph could be seen as an expression of the same principles of design which painters had been thinking about for 100 years earlier. The fact that a photographer might "find" his images in nature, or already pre-existing in the world, did not suggest that the ultimate power and visual tensions could not also be expressed in a photograph, as well as they could in a painting.
The principles of light and shadow, density and depth, texture and shape are exploited in image after image. Nudes, dunes, peppers, lettuce, seashells, bark, water, rock. How natural forms are expressed through the lines and masses of their structure, the weave of their growth, tending and constricting, flattening out or scattered across planes, etc. At their best, Weston's images have a kind of centrifugal, hypnotic power which is both the impact of their novelty as well as a strongly balanced overall composition. His images are always powerfully grounded, they rest solidly, and seem to grow out of their bases organically into the outer reaches of the frame. There often seems to be a kind of integrity derived from a struggle which is held in perfect check by the rationality of the mind (eye). This tension may suggest conditions in the maker (or viewer) for which the image is an analogue. But we need to be careful about imputing narrative or programmatic meanings to such analogies.
Howard Schatz
Annie Leibovitz
Simon Chaput
Imogen Cunningham
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