Kim Weston
Kim Weston is a fine art photographer from California who specializes in nude photography. Weston was born to one of the most influential and creative families in American history and has been making fine-art nude photographs for over 35 years. Kim learned his craft assisting his father, Cole Weston, in the darkroom making gallery prints from the original negatives of his grandfather, Edward Weston. Kim also worked for many years as an assistant to his uncle, Brett Weston, whose bold, abstract photographs ranked him as the "child genius of American photography."
Kim Weston lives on Wildcat Hill, the former home of Edward Weston, with his wife Gina where he teaches several nude photography workshops every year. Browse online or visit the gallery (Carmel Highlands) to view collectable prints of Kim's and Edward Weston from their private archive. In addition, Kim is an educator and a mentor to young photographers having founded the Weston Scholarship Fund (now The Weston Collective) in 2004 to support high school and college students studying fine-art, black and white, film photography in Monterey County.
David Ligare
David Ligare was born in Oak Park, Il. in 1945. He attended Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. Since 1969 he has had over forty solo exhibitions in New York, London, Los Angeles, Rome, San Francisco, and elsewhere. His work has been included in hundreds of group exhibitions around the world and his images have been used in textbooks and as book covers by Oxford University Press, Penguin, Phaidon and many others. In 2015 The Crocker Art Museum presented a retrospective exhibition of Ligare’s work that traveled to three other museums. They also published the large format book entitled, “David Ligare: California Classicist.”
David Ligare’s paintings and drawings are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Wadsworth Atheneum, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Drawing Department of the Uffizi in Florence, and many other institutions. In 2012 David Ligare was elected to the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, in Florence. An organization founded in by Cosimo I de’ Medici in 1563. David Ligare is currently represented by Hirschl & Adler Modern in New York, Galerie Bellefeuille, Montreal, Lewallen Galleries, Santa Fe and Winfield Gallery in Carmel, CA. His next exhibition will open at LewAllen Galleries on August 30th, 2019
Michelle Magdalena
Michelle Magdalena is a commercial and fine art photographer on the Monterey Peninsula and a long time friend of the Westons. Having been supported early on as a guest photographer at Weston workshops and collaborating with Kim Weston on a Big Sur nude photography workshop in 2009. Michelle, who often goes by her nome de plume Magdalena has developed a signature look to her fine art nude collections that are synonymous with the Weston’s historical west coast tradition, reflecting the natural and reverent beauty of nature and the female form with traditional darkroom prints.
Magdalena’s work has been exhibited at the Center for Photographic Art in a group show with Zach Weston titled, “Next Generation” an ode to the black and white film traditions of the area. Magdalena’s latest limited edition portfolio collection of silver gelatin prints is titled “Resurgence” has emerged in parallel with an empowered women’s movement as a body of work identifying women identified with the elemental signatures of Big Sur California with a foreword by Kim Weston. Magdalena expressed her gratitude and love to the Weston’s for all their support and is excited to participate in the Weston’s scholarship fund to support and advance new generations of photographic artists.