Work:
Weston worked in most genres of photograph and began his photographic career by opening a portrait studio. From the 1920s he began to break free from photographic conventions and the argument over photograph as a science or as an artistic medium. His particular skill was the control of tonalities. In the 1920s he was involved in the 'straight' photography movement and in 1932 he was a leading exponent of the f 64 movement (with Willard Van Dyke, Cunningham, Adams et al). Weston was particularly drawn to place and returned to Carmel in California to live between 1929 and 1934. In 1927 he turned to photographing single objects. He became particularly fascinated by shells, peppers and also household implements. He used close up photography to present the precision and detail of the forms. The nude was also important to Weston and he used the body as an object to be photographed as a form. "He made more than one hundred nude studies between 1918 and 1945. His nudes also reflect erotic and sexual enigmas with which he struggled for much of his life". (Naomi Rosenblum, World History of Photography). He received grants from the Guggenheim in 1937 (the first photographer to ever receive a grant from the foundation) and 1938. Weston kept a daily journal from 1923 which were published after his death as his Daybooks.
Many references have been made to the similarities between the development of Alfred Stieglitz's work and Weston's (see Photography, Ian Jeffrey) and they have shared many working practices and interests (e.g. California as holding particular interest, cloud equivalences, they worked together to organise Film und Foto American section). Where the two men differ is in Westons desire to have complete freedom, Stieglitz on the otherhand was a purist and advocated in his later works a truth to nature. Weston took objects out of context and carefully arranged and lit these objects (e.g. shells, kelp, roots, and peppers).
Weston "to present objectively the texture, rhythm, form in nature, without subterfuge or evasion in technique or spirit".
Weston "the very quintessence of the thing itself rather than a mood of that thing."