Uncompromising Passion. The sensual and straight photography of Edward Weston

Edward Weston’s classic images are among the best-known examples of midcentury American photography. This monograph brings together some of Weston's finest works to present his artistic evolution, from painterly observations to what became his signature “Straight Photography” style, which explored the intricacies of natural forms in a myriad of dramatic landscapes and sensual nudes.

Few photographers have created such a legacy as Edward Weston (1886–1958). After a decade of successfully making photographs with painterly soft-focus techniques, he became the driving figure behind a group of West Coast artists dubbed Group f/64, which pioneered the sharp, precise school of “Straight Photography.” With that stylistic leap, Weston’s career moved into high gear, creating photographs of extraordinary sensual realism, perfectly poised between compositional stillness and searing intensity.

With nudes, nature studies, and myriad perspectives on the dramatic Californian landscape, Weston’s works aimed to locate the “very substance and quintessence of the thing itself.” In this concise monograph, we gather some of the finest Weston works to explore how he pursued and achieved this aim whether with a landscape, shell, or naked body.

The editor:

Manfred Heiting is an internationally acknowledged designer, curator, and expert on and collector of photographs and photobooks; he lives in Malibu and Brussels. He is a founding member of the J. Paul Getty Museum Council and since 2016 UCLA Distinguished Lecturer in the Humanities. He is editor and designer of Deutschland im Fotobuch, The Soviet Photobook, and The Japanese Photobook and co-editor and designer of Autopsie: Deutschsprachige Fotobücher 1918–1945.

The author:

Terence Pitts was Executive Director at Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, Iowa, and has organized numerous important exhibitions of historic and contemporary photography.

Uncompromising passion

The Life and Art of Edward Weston

Few photographers have created such a legacy as Edward Weston (1886-1958). After a decade of successfully making photographs with painterly soft-focus techniques, Weston became the key pioneer of the school of precise and sharp presentation, dubbed "Straight Photography." Through the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, Weston was a major force in pushing forward the art of photography. His photographs are monuments of sensual realism, perfectly composed images of stillness that sear with passion and intensity. Whatever the subject, be it a vegetable, landscape, shell, or naked body, Weston’s lens captures the essence of its life force, the fundamentals of its

Few photographers created such an enduring legacy as Edward Weston; few so profoundly influenced the techniques of what can rightly be called pure photography.

Beginning in 1911, when he opened his own portrait studio in California, and over the next four decades, Weston was a major force, constantly pushing the art of photography forward. Focusing on natural forms – the human figure, especially the nude female, seashells, plants, landscapes – he moved away from pictorialism and romanticism to produce a body of work that represented the new modernism, highly sophisticated in its imagery and style.

This book surveys Edward Weston's work more exhaustively than any previous work. A combination of biography and critical analysis, it contains more than 320 photographs meticulously reproduced in duotone. The vintage prints, selected from the Weston archives and the important Lane Collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, trace Weston's development from his early days to the final part of his career as a photographer, tragicallly cut short by the onset of Parkinson's disease.