Photographer Edward Henry Weston
Edward Henry Weston (March 24, 1886 – January 1, 1958)
Its funny how you avoid something and then when you look it becomes something you wish you had embraced ages ago, Edward Weston is such a photographer, I knew the name and kept putting him off I had a view of his work that was wildly wrong, I think in my early research I mixed him up with someone else. but when I look at his work ?I get him, I see the sort of questing for an image that I love to do, (Please don’t misunderstand me I am not claiming to be his equal) his work actually resonates with me, and its an odd feeling because I don’t get that much with other photographers. I may not take the same subjects but the way he attacks his work feels like something I could have gotten in to.
Driven by his sister to take up a career in photography he moved to Effingham, Illinois, in order to enroll in the Illinois School of Photography. The course was a nine month affair, but Weston finished all of the class work in six months. The school refused to give him a diploma unless he paid for the full nine months Weston refused and moved back home.
He started by taking portraits of children family and friends, and eventually started to take nudes, he had a roving eye and it seems had numerous affairs that he kept secret from his wife, she was it is said suspicious of what he did with his models.
Eventually he leaves his wife and family and goes on a tour of Mexico that lasted several years, he received two Guggenheim fellowships that allowed him to finally drop the portraits and pursue his art, he made one quarter of his life’s work in that period concentrating on landscapes. He was a vegetarian and he loved women, and this comes out in a lot of his work from the nudes to the photographs of vegetables. A review in Village Voice said “since he was a vegetarian and a great lover he also treated them equally as delicacies” I was struck by the way he photographed them both in such a similar manner, and how he crossed the subjects over often finding vegetables and plants that looked like nudes the tree in the gallery below that looks like the navel of a woman and the root vegetable that looks like intertwined legs. He had an eye for the sublime he was a prolific photographer and he has just gone to the top of my likes.
I would like to have put some images here but because of copyright problems I have resolved to just add a link to an online collection:
The Symphony Of Light 
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