Edward Weston

Photographer
American, (1886–1958)

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Edward Weston was born in Highland Park, Illinois in 1886. He attended Illinois College of Photography in Effington, Illinois. Weston moved to California where he was hired as a retoucher at the George Steckel Portrait Studio. He also worked at the Louis A. Mojoiner Portrait Studio as a photographer. Weston was a principle in the formation of Group f/64--a loose association of California photographers who promoted a style of sharply focused photographs with great depth of field whose subject matter consisted of natural forms and found objects. Formed in 1932, the group constituted as a revolt against Pictorialism, the painterly, soft-focused photography that was then prevalent among West Coast artists. The name of the group alludes to their devoted use of the smallest aperture setting on a large-format camera in order to impart particularly good resolution and depth of field to their photographs. The first exhibition of Group f/64 took place in 1932 at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco and included the work of Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift, Willard Van Dyke, and Edward Weston. The exhibition stands as a landmark in the history of photography. Weston got Parkinson's disease and died in 1958 in Carmel, California.