When was edward weston born

Upon arriving in California, nineteen-year-old Weston, with his sister's encouragement, began work as a freelance photographer. Postcard camera in hand, he traveled door-to-door in search of work, taking pictures of families, children, and pets, among other subjects.

More formal training was needed to become successful in the field, however, so Weston returned to Chicago in to study at the Illinois College of Photography. The clever youth breezed through the year program in only six months.

Although he received no diploma for his early completion, Weston eagerly returned to California better prepared to make a name for himself. Weston learned still more about photography working as a darkroom assistant and eventually a photographer in the portrait studios of George Steckel and Louis Mojonier in Los Angeles. The aspiring artist exhibited great skill in lighting and posing sitters. Having acquired some business, Weston soon felt prepared to open his own photography studio in Thanks in part to his new wife Flora Chandler's family money, the artist was able to erect what he described as a "little shack surrounded by flowers" on the same plot of land where their home stood in Tropico now Glendale , California.

This studio space doubled as a portraiture business and served as the artist's base of operations for the next 20 years of his career. In addition to growing his photography business within this new, bucolic setting, Weston also voraciously read photography journals and began writing essays on his craft for publications such as American Photography and Photo-Miniature.

Even as he fathered four sons two of whom became photographers in their own right , Weston worked diligently during the next ten years, earning a reputation for his pictorial, soft-focus style. Most praised among his work produced at the time were his high key portraits and modern dance studies. For many of these photos, Weston used an extended exposure time so that the printed image appears brighter and lighter. Within six years of starting his own business, Weston's style began to shift from the painterly, soft focus effect of pictorialism to more sharply focused, crisp photos.

The artist's mutually influential relationship with Margrethe Mather, his studio assistant, model, fellow photographer, and lover for almost a decade, is credited with sparking this change. Armed with a new appreciation for modern abstraction, Weston took another trip in - this time east to New York, where he visited famous photographer Alfred Stieglitz's Gallery.

Impressed by sharply focused photos of carefully cropped modern subjects by both Stieglitz and Paul Strand , Weston continued on to Ohio, the new residence of his sister Mary, and there captured his famous images of the Armco Steel Works.

While photographing these modern industrial marvels, Weston also began recording his personal experiences and artistic experiments in a series of journals that have come to be known as his "daybooks.

Over the next few years, Weston's work, not unlike modern painting at the time, became increasingly abstract, focusing on form with the intent of capturing the essence of the thing pictured. With new-found motivation and having concluded his affair with Mather, Weston ventured to Mexico City in with his eldest son Chandler and his apprentice, model, and eventually his lover, Tina Modotti.

Like Mather before her, Modotti, with her political mind and bohemian lifestyle, deeply influenced Weston. In Mexico, the artist created photos of subjects that varied from the desert landscape and ordinary household fixtures to portraits of Modotti and political activists he met through her, such as Guadalupe de Rivera Diego Rivera's wife at the time. Weston's time in Mexico was also a time of reflection and self-examination. In his daybooks, Weston lamented being away from his sons and grappled with issues related to his tumultuous relationship with his estranged wife.

Flora shared his pain. Tate Etc. The emblem of earthly vanities: Shadows Keith Miller In folk tales, Gothic novels and film noir, shadows are premonitions, harbingers of threat and death. You might like Left Right. Lionel Wendt — Dorothea Lange — Herbert Bayer — Claude Cahun — Aenne Biermann — Jacques-Henri Lartigue — Ryukichi Shibuya — Lisette Model — Eugene Smith — Weston found great commercial success in photography in the next few years, and he also won many prizes for his works.

Though Weston succeeded in his photography career, he always struggled financially. He became a member of the London Salon in He also burned most of the negatives that he took before , showing that he only wanted to be remembered for his later works. In , he moved on to Mexico and opened a studio with Tina Modotti, both his lover and an artist.