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APERTURE
Edward Weston: The Flame of Recognition
Edited with foreword by Nancy Newhall. Preface by Ansel Adams.
This classic monograph, first issued as a hardcover in 1965, began its life in 1958 as a monographic issue of Aperture magazine published in celebration of Weston's life. Drawing on a decades-long collaboration between the photographer and Nancy Newhall, Aperture cofounder and early MoMA curator, this volume brings together a sequence of images and excerpts from Weston's writing in an effort to channel the photographer's creativity and, in his own words, "present clearly my feeling for life with photographic beauty ... without subterfuge or evasion in spirit or technique." Now, 50 years later, Aperture presents a reissue of this volume, which covers the range of Weston's greatest works, from the portraits and nudes to the landscapes and still-lifes. Accompanying and amplifying the images are Weston's own thoughts, excerpted from his now-famed daybooks and letters. Others who contributed to the making of the book include two of the artist's sons, Brett and Cole, and two other Aperture cofounders, filmmaker and author Dody Warren Weston and Ansel Adams, whose preface offers a posthumous tribute to the oeuvre of a remarkable artist. A brief bibliography as well as a chronology offer further insight into the life and work of this giant of twentieth-century photography. Edward Weston (1886–1958) began to earn an international reputation for his portrait work around 1911, but it was not until 1922 that he came fully into his own as an artist, with his photographs of the Armco Steel mill in Ohio. From 1923 to 1926 he worked in Mexico and California, where he lived with his sons, turning increasingly to subjects such as nudes, clouds and close-ups of rocks, trees, vegetables and shells. On a Guggenheim Fellowship from 1937 to 1939, he photographed throughout the American West. In 1948 Weston made his last photograph; he had been stricken with Parkinson's disease several years earlier.
Featured image is reproduced from Edward Weston: The Flame of Recognition.
"Two Shells" (1927) is reproduced from Edward Weston: The Flame of Recognition, Aperture's fiftieth anniversary reissue of this classic volume by one of the giants of twentieth-century photography. In a July 25, 1927, entry in his daybook, made in Glendale, California, Weston writes, "I must take time to write about the reactions to my shell prints, as written by Tina [Modotti] from Mexico after showing them to several old acquaintances. First, to quote briefly the most salient remarks. 'My God Edward, your last photographs surely took my breath away. I feel speechless in front of them. What purity of vision. When I opened the package I couldn’t look at them very long, they stirred up all my innermost feelings so that I felt a physical pain… Edward—nothing before in art has affected me like these photographs. I cannot look at them long without feeling exceedingly perturbed, they disturb me not only mentally but physically. There is something so pure and at the same time so perverse about them. They contain both the innocence of natural things and the morbidity of a sophisticated, distorted mind. They make me think of lilies and embryos. They are mystical and erotic…'" continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 8.25 x 9.75 in. / 112 pgs / 64 duotone. LIST PRICE: U.S. $45.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $55 ISBN: 9781597113106 PUBLISHER: Aperture AVAILABLE: 5/26/2015 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: No longer our product AVAILABILITY: Not Available
Published by Aperture. Edited with foreword by Nancy Newhall. Preface by Ansel Adams.
This classic monograph, first issued as a hardcover in 1965, began its life in 1958 as a monographic issue of Aperture magazine published in celebration of Weston's life. Drawing on a decades-long collaboration between the photographer and Nancy Newhall, Aperture cofounder and early MoMA curator, this volume brings together a sequence of images and excerpts from Weston's writing in an effort to channel the photographer's creativity and, in his own words, "present clearly my feeling for life with photographic beauty ... without subterfuge or evasion in spirit or technique." Now, 50 years later, Aperture presents a reissue of this volume, which covers the range of Weston's greatest works, from the portraits and nudes to the landscapes and still-lifes. Accompanying and amplifying the images are Weston's own thoughts, excerpted from his now-famed daybooks and letters. Others who contributed to the making of the book include two of the artist's sons, Brett and Cole, and two other Aperture cofounders, filmmaker and author Dody Warren Weston and Ansel Adams, whose preface offers a posthumous tribute to the oeuvre of a remarkable artist. A brief bibliography as well as a chronology offer further insight into the life and work of this giant of twentieth-century photography.
Edward Weston (1886–1958) began to earn an international reputation for his portrait work around 1911, but it was not until 1922 that he came fully into his own as an artist, with his photographs of the Armco Steel mill in Ohio. From 1923 to 1926 he worked in Mexico and California, where he lived with his sons, turning increasingly to subjects such as nudes, clouds and close-ups of rocks, trees, vegetables and shells. On a Guggenheim Fellowship from 1937 to 1939, he photographed throughout the American West. In 1948 Weston made his last photograph; he had been stricken with Parkinson's disease several years earlier.
