In Focus: Edward Weston

Brett Abbott

Edward Weston (1886–1958) helped define twentieth-century American photography. Weston wed machine-age aesthetics with vernacular subjects, pursuing Modernism as a way of seeing. He produced works of art using subject matter as wide ranging as sea shells, green peppers, sand dunes, and nudes, and he set a standard for elegant composition and print technique for generations of photographers. The more-than-fifty works included here were made in Claremont, Glendale, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and other locations in California and the U.S.

The book includes commentaries on all of the featured works, an introduction, a chronology, and a transcription of a colloquium on the photographer's life and work.

Brett Abbott is former associate curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum.