Willie, New Orleans, from the "Fiftieth Anniversary Portfolio 1902-1952"

About the Photographer

Weston, Edward

American, 1886-1942

Edward Weston is an icon of 20th century photography. His sharp, meticulously composed and printed images of the American West influenced a generation of artists. A founding member of the f/64 group along with Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham, Weston photographed landscapes, natural forms, nudes, still lifes, and portraits over the course of his 40-year career. He was drawn to tactile surfaces and organic forms. The rocks and trees of his beloved Point Lobos, California, not far from where he lived for many years, were perhaps the longest lasting and most fecund of all his subjects. Weston made his last photographs there, including "Tar Drippings," in the decade from 1938 to 1948, the year he was stricken with Parkinson's disease. In 1946, the Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective exhibition of some 300 of Weston’s prints, exemplary of the modernist style he is credited with having pioneered.