Edward Weston

Grant Snodgrass

1-26-11

Computers Class

 Edward Weston 

Over view of Weston’s life: Edward Weston was a very influential American photographer. Weston was born in Chicago in 1886. He moved to California to study pictorialism, which was a popular type of photography then. After this he decided that pictorialism was not the right kind of photography for him so he moved on to a different type of photography that was much more advanced and was much more detailed. 

Over the next forty four years of Weston’s life he expanded to a extremely wide variations of photography such as still life, landscapes and most any other. He was the first to get the Guddenheim Fellowship award for photography with his 8x10 camera. Some of Weston’s most famous photos are from the trees, rocks and nature near his home in California.   

  Sadly Weston was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 1947 and stopped his photography currier then. For the ten years following that he saw that all of his 1,00 most famous pictures were printed. Until in 1958 when he died from his disease. 

Weston’s earlier life: He was born in Highland Park Illinois. He was the second child of Edward and Alice Weston who was a Shakespearean actress. Edward Weston’s mother died when he was just five years old so Weston was raised by his one older sister who was just nine when their mother died. Edward and his sister, May, had a very strong relation ship from their early years. It was on of the only solid relationships that Weston had.       

Weston’s later life: May moved to California when Weston was about 21 and because of their close relationship Weston moved down there from Illinois as well to pursue his interest in photography. But there they did not have the professional training in photography that he needed, so Weston moved back to Illinois to take a better 9 mouth course in photography, he finished it in 5 mouths. This degree would lead to a 44 career of photography.