Formats Book Description Publication Date: January 17, 2006 Born in Illinois in 1886, Edward Weston opened a studio in California in 1911 where he achieved success as a commercial photographer, making portraits in the popular soft-focus, pictorialist style of the time. By the early 1920s, Weston had become dissatisfied with these 'false', retouched and manipulated images, and after meeting Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler in 1922, began to adopt a more straightforward, realistic style of photography. In 1922 Weston took photographs of the Armco Steelworks in Ohio and his break with pictorialism is evident in the simplicity and clarity of his sharply focused image of a row of smokestacks. The following year, Weston moved to Mexico where he continued to experiment with 'straight photography' in a series of nude studies of Tina Modotti, his lover and collaborator over the next few years. Modotti introduced him to the artists Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco who influenced Weston to develop his modernist style. In the later 1920s and 30s Weston worked on his well-known series of close-up still lifes which included abstract, formally precise images of shells, peppers and artichokes and other natural forms. Photographing on a large format camera with exposures of up to four hours and with only natural light, Weston's preoccupation with form and pattern is also evident in his nude studies (particularly of his second wife Charis Wilson) and in his landscapes. In 1937, Weston embarked on a period of sustained work on the American