This captivating biography reveals the previously untold love story of Edward Weston and Margrethe Mather. Both were photographic artists at the center of the bohemian cultural scene in Los Angeles during the 1910s and 1920s, yet Weston would become a major Modernist photographer while Mather, who Weston ultimately expunged from his journals, would fall into obscurity. The book reveals how they and their entourage sought out the limelight as the Hollywood film industry came of age. Based on ten years of research and illustrated with extraordinary images, some never published, this history has a captivating range of characters, including Charlie Chaplin, Imogen Cunningham, Max Eastman, Emma Goldman, Tina Modotti, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Carl Sandburg. The lively text brings to life the ambiance of this exciting time in Los Angeles history as well as its darker side. Artful Lives exceeds any previously published account of this key period in Weston's development and reveals Mather's important contribution to it, making it an essential reference in Weston studies.

An examination of the personal and professional relationship between two important American photographers.

Thoroughly researched and beautifully produced, this catalogue complements the first comprehensive retrospective in the United States of Imogen Cunningham’s work in over thirty-five years. Celebrated American artist Imogen Cunningham (1883–1976) enjoyed a long career as a photographer, creating a large and diverse body of work that underscored her unique vision, versatility, and commitment to the medium. An early feminist and inspiration to future generations, Cunningham intensely engaged with Pictorialism and Modernism; genres of portraiture, landscape, the nude, still life, and street photography; and themes such as flora, dancers and music, hands, and the elderly. Organized chronologically, this volume explores the full range of the artist’s life and career. It contains nearly two hundred color images of Cunningham’s elegant, poignant, and groundbreaking photographs, both renowned and lesser known, including several that have not been published previously. Essays by Paul Martineau and Susan Ehrens draw from extensive primary source material such as letters, family albums, and other intimate materials to enrich readers’ understanding of Cunningham’s motivations and work.

From nudes to landscapes, a wide-ranging retrospective of the work of Edward Weston, one of the greatest twentieth-century American photographers. This gorgeous volume shows the work of one of the major twentieth-century artists whose output has influenced the very conception of photography for generations to come. After abandoning pictorial photography, Weston turned his interest in the direction of realism, developing his own original style based on the quest for a pure form to express his contemporary world. He believed that the world around him, whether it be the face of a woman, a place, or a vegetable, did not require special devices to be recorded: in fact, he felt that it is inside the mind that things become proud-looking sculptures, objects that seem to come to life on their own. This thoughtful selection of 110 photographs is an eloquent testimony to Weston's teachings, bearing witness to the experiences that contributed to making him the artist he was: from his interest in modernism and cubism to his years in Mexico, where he shared the echoes of European surrealism with the local artists; from his decision to move to Point Lobos, a location that was of crucial importance to the development of his vision of the landscape, to his intense relationships with women who were his muses and companions in his everyday life as well as in his photography.

This book presents Weston's earliest work from a recently discovered family album and compares the artist's naive first artistic efforts with his latest masterworks to show the persistence and evolution of his singular vision to find essential form in the vernacular with an ever-increasing intensity -- Provided by the publisher.

Tina Modotti and Edward Weston arrived in Mexico in 1923 at the start of an extraordinary period of artistic creativity that became known as the Mexican Renaissance. The book traces the interwoven lives and work of Modotti and Weston from the early 1920's in Los Angeles, where they met, until the 1930's, focusing in detail on their time together in Mexico, where virtually all of Modotti's photographs were taken. In bringing together for the first time close to 150 photographs by Modotti and Weston, it reveals the distinctive responses to Mexico of two photographers from widely different backgrounds. At the same time, like other Modernists in Mexico, these two artists self-consciously created work that broke wholly with the immediate past, and fashioned an idiom in defiance of traditional ideas. A selection of images by two Mexican photographers, Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Mariana Yampolsky, reveals how indigenous photography was influenced by these two foreigners.

"This is the first major book to celebrate the Huntington's collection of five hundred Edward Weston photographs, all of them selected and printed for the institution by the artist in the 1940s. The Guggenheim photographs lie at the heart of this legacy, but Weston also included in his gift still-life studies from the early 1920s and 1930s, as well as later landscapes from the 1940s. Weston selected these photographs as representative of his best work, and they are reproduced here, complemented by investigations into the influences that shaped them."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Photographs of Edward Weston_

Featuring the biggest names in Modern Art, Modern Couples explores creative relationships, across painting, sculpture, photography, design and literature. Meet the artist couples that forged new ways of making art and of living and loving. The exhibition illuminates these creative and personal relationships, from the obsessional and fleeting to the life-long. Including Dora Maar & Pablo Picasso; Salvador Dalí & Federico García Lorca; Camille Claudel & Auguste Rodin; Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera; Emilie Flöge & Gustav Klimt - plus many more.--

A memoir of the wife and model of photographer Edward Weston details their marriage and professional collaboration