Author Description

This new book surveys Edward Weston's work more comprehensively and exhaustively than any previous work. A combination of biography and critical analysis, it offers more than 320 meticulously reproduced duotone images, nearly a quarter of which have never been reproduced in books before. The selected photographs trace Weston's career from his early days, through formative years in Mexico, and on through the balance of his career, which ended because of the onset of Parkinson's disease ten years prior to his death in 1958. Treated chronologically and emphasizing Weston's creative preoccupations in each period, the book includes work that he created in 1938 and 1939 with funds from the first two Guggenheim Foundation grants ever awarded to a photographer.. To illustrate the book vintage prints have been selected from the copious Weston Archives at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, and the highly important Lane Collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Nearly 10,000 photographs have been examined in order to select those reproduced in the book.