In Focus, Edward Weston: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (In Focus Series)
Brett Abbott, J Paul Getty MuseumBooks.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
A seminal figure in the history of photography, Edward Weston (1886-1958) began his long and colorful 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.
Synopsis
This small book contains beautifully reproduced black & white photographs by American photographer Edward Weston. The concise text that accompanies the plates describes Weston's life and work, and is followed in the second section of the book by a more in-depth discussion, which resulted from a conversation held between eight curators and scholars during a colloquium on Weston at the Getty Center in October 2003. A broad range of Weston's work has been selected for this volume: portraits, nudes, landscapes, cityscapes, and still-lives. The book includes a chronology, but no subject index. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR