In Focus

A seminal figure in the history of photography, Edward Weston (1886-1958) began his long and colourful career in Southern California. Among the more than fifty prints gleaned from the Getty Museum's important collection of approximately 240 works that span the photographer's career, this book features pictures made in Claremont, Glendale, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and other locations in California and the U.S. 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 to come. Commentaries on each of the featured works, as well as an introduction and chronology, are provided by Brett Abbott, curatorial assistant in the Getty Museum's Department of Photographs. A colloquium discussion on the artist's work includes Abbott's contributions as well as those of six other participants: photographer William Clift, Amy Conger, author of Edward Weston: Photographs from the Collection of the Center for Creative Photography, David Featherstone, a freelance writer and editor, Weston Naef, curator of photographs at the Getty Museum, David Travis, curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Jennifer Watts, curator of photographs at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California.