Photographs by: Edward Weston, Brett Weston, Cole Weston & Cara Weston

Edward Weston’s birth in 1886 launched a unique contribution to photography.
Over the last 100 years, Edward, his sons – Brett and Cole – and grandchildren represent a major force… The Weston Legacy.

THE WESTON LEGACY

This exhibition of the work of Edward, Brett, Cole & Cara Weston illustrates the diversity and endurance of that legacy. For those who know the work of Edward Weston, but have not had the opportunity to see prints of his images first hand, we hope that this will be a rich adventure. If you do not know the work of his son, we expect that you will have the same experience. It seems ironic that Cole Weston, whom his father entrusted to produce elegant black and white prints of his work when he was no longer able to himself, should be enamored with color. His own pictures display the same sense of exactness and commitment to excellence that he showed in bringing his father’s negatives to paper.

From portraiture to landscapes… from still lifes to nudes… in America and elsewhere… both men share an eye for the world around them that provokes the viewer.

“Art begins where words end” – Edward Weston

Featured in this exhibition is the work of three photographers.

Select the image below to view the complete artist page for these photographers.

Edward Weston

Cole Weston

Cara Weston

Below is an excerpt of a review from the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.
To read the entire review please access the AJC web site.

DATE: October 7, 2007
PUBLICATION: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
BYLINE: CATHERINE FOX
TITLE: The Lens Of A Giant

EXHIBITION: The Weston Legacy

Atlanta Celebrates Photography is always a great opportunity for exposure (forgive me) to contemporary photography. This year, more than in fests past, brings 20th-century masters to the fore.

“Loving/Longing,” an icon-packed group exhibition opening Thursday at Agnes Scott College, casts a wide net of American and European greats. For depth of focus, there’s the High Museum’s presentation of Harry Callahan’s photos of his wife Eleanor and “The Weston Legacy” at the Atlanta gallery Lumière.

Although the Lumiere show honors a family of photographers, its center is, inevitably, the patriarch. Edward Weston is, after all, one of the giants of “straight photography.” Many of the memorable images in this show are embedded in our cultural consciousness, and they exerted a profound influence on ensuing generations.

Weston came of age artistically when photography was flexing its muscles as an art form. Disavowing pretensions to painting, practitioners on several continents championed the clarity and realism that they felt represented the medium’s unique character.

Together with the like-minded West Coast artists in Group f/64, Weston took up the call. In nudes, nature studies and California landscapes, he sought to render “the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself.”

To that end, he depicted objects isolated and free of distractions. The velvety black void in which “Shell’s” (1927) nautilus floats accentuates its shape and the crisp details he was able to record with his 8×10 view camera. It becomes the very shellness of shell.

But “straight” did not always mean straightforward. Weston often presented the dunes, the shore, the rocky hills of his beloved landscape shorn of context — an anchoring horizon line, say — so that the photos teeter between reality and abstraction.

A combination of high vantage point, spatial ambiguity and crystalline clarity in “Surf, Point Lobos” (1938) turns the vista of sea crashing on the shore into a yin-yang of light and dark.

And realism doesn’t mean nothing but the facts. Out of time, and context, still as a Byzantine icon, his images simmer with spirituality, animism almost.

But they are earthy, too: This is an artist who managed to make a disembodied pair of knees sexy, not to mention a cabbage leaf. In said close-up, the languid leaf suggests the drape of lingerie to come-hither effect. Just to be sure you don’t miss the point, Lumiere juxtaposes his femme fatale “Pepper” with a series of his nudes.

Vast and intimate, gorgeous and sober, sensual and spare, the best of these photos explain Edward Weston’s place in the pantheon and the high bar he set for the photographers who followed.

Bottom line: A great opportunity to spend time with a master.