page_title: Fred R. Archer
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Fred R. Archer / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: A photo of Edward Weston taken approximately 1915 by Fred R. Archer
context_page_description: Fred Robert Archer, was an American photographer who collaborated with Ansel Adams to create the Zone System. He was a portrait photographer, specializing early in his career in portraits of Hollywood movie stars. He was associated with the artistic trend in photography known as pictorialism. He later became a photography teacher, and ran his own photography school for many years.
  Along with Edward Weston, whose portrait he took, Archer was known as one of the "two big names in art photography in those days out on the west coast". He socialized with and exchanged ideas with many other artists and intellectuals in Los Angeles for decades. He was "without a doubt, the individual with the longest history of participation in the Southern California Salon movement."
context_section_description: He was born on December 3, 1889 in Georgia, and his family moved to Los Angeles, California. Archer was experimenting with photography as early as 1915, when he made a portrait of Edward Weston.  Archer served in a military aerial photography unit in France in World War I, and returned to the United States in May, 1919.  He began studying commercial art, and photography was at that time a hobby of his. In less than a year, Archer gained critical attention in two east coast photography journals, American Photography and Photo-era Magazine, which reported that he had exhibited five "somber" photos of the World War I battlefields of France at the Seventh Pittsburgh Salon.
  In the early 1920s, he was hired as assistant head of the Art Title Department for Universal Pictures and was promoted to head the department the following year.  He soon moved on to motion picture photography.
caption: Edward Weston, taken by Fred Archer in approximately 1915
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