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Brett Weston
Biography
Brett Weston
seemed destined from birth to become one of the greatest American
photographers. Born in 1911 in Los Angeles, California, Weston was the
second son of famous photographer Edward Weston.
At the age of
14, his father removed him from school where they then relocated to
Edward Weston’s photographic studio in Mexico. It was in Mexico where
Weston began making photographs with a Graflex 3 ¼ x 4 ¼ Camera. He
became his father’s apprentice and was introduced to painters like Diego
Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco, and photographers such as Tina Modotti.
These artists introduced the young Weston to modern art forms, which
unquestionably influenced his early sense of form and composition. Under
the astonished eye of his father, Weston began his legendary technical
precision, bold design and extreme abstractions of form. His father once
observed that Weston was doing better work at the age 14 then he had
done at the age of 30 years old. According to the curator of the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Van Deren Coke, “Brett Weston was the
child genius of American photography.”
Weston
returned to California in 1926 and continued to assist his father in his
Glendale portrait studio where he exhibited and sold his own
photographs. His first prints were put on exhibit at UCLA in 1927. His
first solo exhibition was held the same year at the Jake Zeitlin’s
bookstore and gallery in Los Angeles. At the age of eighteen, Weston
received critical attention after his work was displayed in the Film and
Foto exhibition in Stuttgart, Germany among renowned photographers; Man
Ray, Berenice Abbot, Paul Outerbridge, and his own father Edward Weston.
Weston worked
as a sculptor and photographer for the Works Progress Administration in
1936 and worked as a cameraman for 20th Century Fox war films before
being drafted in 1941. Two years earlier his portfolio of San Francisco
images was published. While in the army Weston served under the command
of ex-Farm Security Administration photographer Arthur Rothstein on Long
Island. When on the off-duty, Weston began photographing the diverse
forms and textures of the New York metropolis with large format 8’x10”
and 11x14” view cameras. Later a portfolio of these images was published
in 1951.
In 1946 after
being discharged from the Army, Weston was awarded a Guggenheim
Fellowship. At this time he chose to continue photographing the East
Coast; however after completing this venture Weston moved to Carmel,
California in order to pursue only fine art work. Weston was prolific in
his photographs, but remained devoted to the quiet, solitary pursuit of
his work and was very selective about what he exhibited during his life.
In 1952, Weston again assisted his father, who was suffering from
Parkinson’s disease, to print the Edward Weston 50th Anniversary
Portfolio. Weston’s first book publication, Brett Weston Photographs,
appeared in 1956.
Throughout the
decades of the 1950s and 1970s, Brett Weston's style changed sharply and
was characterized by high contrast, abstract imagery. The subjects he
chose were, for the most part, not unlike what interested him early in
his career; plant leaves, knotted roots and tangled kelp along the
beach. He concentrated mostly on close-ups and abstracted details, but
his prints reflected a preference for high contrast that reduced his
subjects to pure form. In the late 1970s and into the 1980s Weston spent
much of his time in Hawaii where he said, "I have found in this
environment, everything I could want to interpret about the world
photographically." He died at his Hawaiian home, in Kona, in January,
1993.
Brett Weston’s
lifetime devotion and total involvement with the medium created a body
of work and a contribution to photography that transcends comparisons to
his father and has few equals in contemporary photography.
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