Edward Weston: Portrait of the Young Man As an Artist

Over the course of his fifty-year career, American photographer Edward Weston (1886-1958) blazed a path into Photo-Modernism rendering portraits, landscapes, still-lifes and nudes. In 1902, a sixteen-year-old Weston took up photography in Highland Park, Illinois, where he worked as an amateur for five years. In 1907, at the age of twenty-one, Weston moved to Tropico, California, now the city of Glendale in Los Angeles County, where he constructed his first studio and set about with great purpose to become a photographic artist. Examining Weston's earliest sharp- and soft-focus photographs reveals that the young artist had already formed a perfect sense of composition that was to be the hallmark of his later work.

Presenting Weston's earliest work from a recently discovered family album, Edward Weston: Portrait of the Young Man as an Artist compares the artist's naive first artistic efforts with his latest masterworks to show the persistence and evolution of his singular vision to find essential form in the vernacular with an ever-increasing intensity.

As a young man deeply intuitive and original in his creative expression, Edward Weston demonstrates that his teenage work, beginning with his amateur snapshots, embrace the same significant form as the later work for which he is now considered a master.

Graham Howe is the CEO of Pasadena based arts organization Curatorial Assistance, which he founded in 1988. Howe was the founding director of the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney (1973-75), curator to the Graham Nash Collection (1978-1986), and visiting curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1984-1985), before creating Curatorial Assistance, for which he has curated and toured several hundred exhibitions. He is the biographer of American photographer, Paul Outerbridge and German-born British Photo-Modernist, E.O. Hoppe. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting, Sculpture and Graphic Art, majoring in Photography, from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Beth Gates Warren is an independent photography historian and a former Senior Vice-President and Director of the Photographs Department at Sotheby’s New York auction house. Warren has published two books on Edward Weston’s early career: A Passionate Collaboration: Margrethe Mather and Edward Weston (Norton, 2001) and Artful Lives: Edward Weston, Margrethe Mather and the Bohemians of Los Angeles (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011). She has also lectured on Weston’s life and career at numerous museums and educational institutions.