Edward Weston

Edward Weston competed for the Chicago Archers at the 1904 St. Louis Olympics, alongside his father Edward Weston, a prominent photographer. The son would eventually surpass the father in reputation and became one of the early pioneers of photographic art in the United States.

Weston left Chicago in 1906 and moved to near Los Angeles but returned to Chicago to study at the Illinois College of Photography. In 1910 he opened his own studio, “The Little Studio”, in Topico, California. He later met Margrethe Mather, who became his assistant and then a partner in his studio. In the early 1920s Weston travelled to New York to study with Alfred Stieglitz, then the most prominent American photographer. Weston specialized in nude photographs of women, which caused some problems with his marriage, and his relationship with his nude subjects often went beyond mere photography.

Weston started out in the genre of soft focus pictorialism, which was popular in the early 20th century, but he eventually moved to highly detailed photography, at which he was a pioneer. Weston wrote detailed journals concerning his work, which were later housed at The Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona.

Weston travelled extensively in Mexico and then set up a studio in Carmel, California. He became quite well-known and had multiple exhibits of his works. In 1937 Weston received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the first ever given to a photographer. In the mid-1940s his career slowed when he developed Parkinson’s syndrome. In his final years he oversaw the production of prints of his most popular photographs. The disease progressed and he eventually succumbed to it at his home on New Year’s Day 1958.