Edward Weston (1886 to 1958) was an American photographer who worked mainly in California, with three years in Mexico in the 1920s. Using a large view camera and contact prints, he made sharply focused black and white photographs of shells, vegetables, nudes, sand dunes and the rocks and trees of Point Lobos. He is known above all for showing that a pepper or a shell, looked at closely enough, can carry a whole picture.
Weston began as a successful soft-focus portrait photographer and then rejected that manner completely. A trip to New York in 1922 brought him into contact with Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler. In Mexico he worked beside Tina Modotti. In 1932 he joined Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham and others in Group f/64, which set sharp, unmanipulated photography against the painterly prints of the previous generation.
A portrait studio in Tropico and a steel mill in Ohio
Edward Henry Weston was born in Highland Park, Illinois, on March 24, 1886. His father gave him a Kodak Bull’s-Eye No. 2 box camera for his sixteenth birthday in 1902, and he photographed Chicago’s parks and his aunt’s farm. His first published picture appeared in the magazine Camera and Darkroom in 1906, the year he moved to Tropico, California, now part of Glendale. He studied at the Illinois College of Photography in Effingham, finishing the course in six months, then worked in Los Angeles as a negative retoucher. He married Flora Chandler in 1909, and they had four sons: Chandler, Brett, Neil and Cole.
He opened his own portrait studio in Tropico and worked from it for about two decades. His soft-focus prints won prizes in national competitions and were published in magazines such as Photo-Era and American Photography. This was Pictorialism, one of the movements that tried to make photographs resemble other art.
In 1922 he visited his sister in Middletown, Ohio, and photographed the smoke stacks of the Armco steel mill. He made only five or six negatives, but they mark his turn from soft focus to hard edges. In October and November of that year he went to New York and showed his prints to Stieglitz.
Mexico, then shells and peppers
In 1923 Weston left for Mexico with his son Chandler and Tina Modotti, and opened a studio in Mexico City. He exhibited at the Aztec Land Gallery that October, and the painters Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros and José Orozco praised the work. He photographed folk art, toys and everyday objects, made portraits and nudes, and in 1926 travelled the country with Modotti and his son Brett photographing native crafts under a contract with the writer Anita Brenner. He returned to California at the end of 1926 and never went back.
In early 1927 he met the painter Henrietta Shore, saw her paintings of shells and borrowed some of the shells to photograph. He made fourteen shell negatives that year. Vegetables followed: cabbage, kale, onions, and in August 1930 the green peppers that Sonya Noskowiak, a photographer who was then his assistant and companion, brought home. Over four days he made at least thirty negatives of them.
He moved to Carmel in 1929 and began the regular visits to nearby Point Lobos that continued for the rest of his working life. There he photographed kelp, rocks and wind-blown trees.
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Group f/64, the Guggenheim years and Point Lobos
Group f/64 was formed in 1932, and its first exhibition opened at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco on November 15 of that year. Its seven founders were Weston, Adams, Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift and Willard Van Dyke. The name is an aperture setting on large format cameras. The group’s manifesto called for pure photography that followed the nature and limits of the medium and borrowed nothing from painting. It had dissolved by the end of 1935.
In 1937 Weston became the first photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. With Charis Wilson, whom he married in 1939, he drove across the American West, covering 16,697 miles by her log. The fellowship was renewed for a second year. Wilson wrote the text for California and the West (1940), which held 96 of his photographs. She was also the model for the nudes he made among the sand dunes at Oceano. A commission to illustrate an edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass then took them through 24 states in 1941.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York gave him a retrospective in 1946. By late 1948 Parkinson’s disease had left him unable to use his view camera. His last negatives were made at Point Lobos, and the final one is titled Rocks and Pebbles, 1948. In his last years his sons Brett and Cole printed his negatives under his direction. He died at his home, Wildcat Hill, in Carmel Highlands on January 1, 1958, and his sons scattered his ashes in the Pacific at Pebbly Beach on Point Lobos.
How Weston’s pictures are made to work
Weston’s method was simple to state and slow to carry out. Each part of it can be learned.
- A big negative, printed at its own size. For most of his mature work he used an 8×10 view camera and made contact prints, which are exactly the size of the negative. Nothing is enlarged, so detail is not lost. Large format photography is still used for this reason.
- The smallest aperture. The shell called Nautilus was made at f/64. A very small aperture gives great depth of field, so the whole object is sharp from front to back, but it lets in very little light.
- Very long exposures. With slow film and a tiny aperture, his still lifes could need exposures measured in hours. The Nautilus exposure was four and a half hours. The shell stood on the head of an oil drum, and passing trucks shook it and ruined several attempts.
- One object, a plain setting. The shell stands upright against a dark background. The pepper sits inside a tin funnel laid on its side, which Weston found set the pepper off and added reflected light to its contours. With nothing else in the frame, shape and surface do all the work.
- The print is seen before the exposure. Weston wrote about previsualising the final print as early as 1922. Previsualization means deciding what the print will look like and then exposing and developing to get it.
- Careful darkroom work on each sheet. He developed negatives one at a time in trays, inspecting each as it developed, and made extensive use of dodging and burning when printing.
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Photographs to look for
- Armco Steel, Ohio (1922). The smoke stacks of a steel mill, seen sharply. Compare it with any of his earlier studio portraits to see how much he gave up in one step.
- Nautilus (1927). A single chambered nautilus shell standing upright against a dark background. Weston made twenty-eight prints of it, more than of any other shell negative. Notice how the plain dark field leaves only the curve and the glow of the surface.
- Pepper No. 30 (1930). A single green pepper inside a tin funnel, one of at least thirty pepper negatives made over four days in August 1930. Accounts of the exposure differ, from minutes to hours. Look at how the reflected light from the funnel traces the edges of the pepper.
- Nude (Charis, Santa Monica). One of the first pictures he made of Wilson after she joined him in 1935, taken at their home. It became one of his most published images.
- The Oceano dunes series. Sand dunes and figure studies made on several trips to Oceano in the mid 1930s. The same attention to edge and surface that he gave a shell is applied to a landscape.
- Rocks and Pebbles (1948). His final negative, made at Point Lobos, the place he photographed from 1929 until he could no longer handle the camera.
Try this: one vegetable, one background
Take 15 minutes. Choose one pepper, onion or cabbage half. Stand it inside something plain and curved, such as a mixing bowl or a large pot turned on its side, near a window with no direct sun. Put the camera or phone on a table or tripod so it cannot move. Fill the frame with the object. If the camera allows it, set the smallest aperture, the lowest ISO and let the exposure run as long as it needs, using a self-timer. Make six frames, turning the vegetable a little each time and changing nothing else. Pick the one where the outline is clearest and the surface shows the most.
Questions people ask about Edward Weston
What camera did Edward Weston use?
For still lifes and landscapes he used 8×10 view cameras and printed the negatives by contact. From 1933 he used a smaller 4×5 Graflex camera for portraits.
What was Group f/64?
It was a group of California photographers founded in 1932 by Weston, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke and three others. They used large cameras, small apertures and contact printing to get precise detail, and they opposed the painterly methods of Pictorialism.
Why is Pepper No. 30 famous?
It is the most popular of his pepper photographs and has been described as one of the masterpieces of photography. Weston himself wrote in his Daybooks that it was a classic and completely satisfying, and he made at least 25 prints of it.
Where is Edward Weston’s archive?
The Edward Weston Archive is at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, which acquired it in 1981. It holds more than 2,000 exhibition prints, over 10,000 negatives, and his Daybooks and correspondence.
Edward Weston is one of the photographers in the A to Z of photographers, and he is quoted on the photography quotes page.