A Family Tradition

Edward Weston

Edward Weston (b.1886 - d.1958) began photographing at the early age of sixteen after receiving a Bull's Eye #2 camera from his father, Edward Burbank Weston. Weston’s first photographs captured the parks of Chicago and his aunt’s rural farm. In 1906 he moved to California to live with his sister May. Weston married his first wife, Flora Chandler in 1909. With Flora he had four children, Edward Chandler (1910), Theodore Brett (1911), Laurence Neil (1916) and Cole (1919). In 1911, Weston opened his own portrait studio in Tropico, California. This would be his base of operation for the next two decades. Weston became successful working in soft-focus, pictorial style, winning many salons and professional awards. He gained an international reputation for his high key styled portraits and modern dance studies. Articles about his work were published in magazines such as American Photography, Photo Era and Photo Miniature.

In 1923 Weston moved to Mexico City where he opened a photographic studio with his apprentice and lover Tina Modotti. Many important portraits and nudes were taken during his time in Mexico. It was also here that famous artists; Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and Jose Orozco hailed Weston as the master of 20th century art.

After returning to California in 1926, Weston began his work for which he is most deservedly famous: natural forms, close-ups, nudes, and landscapes. Between 1927 and 1930, Weston made a series of monumental close-ups of seashells, peppers, and halved cabbages, bringing out the rich textures of their sculpture-like forms. He moved to Carmel, California in 1929 and shot the first of many photographs of rocks and trees at Point Lobos, California.

He became one of the founding members of Group f/64 in 1932 with Ansel Adams, Willard Van Dyke, Imogen Cunningham and Sonya Noskowiak. The group chose this optical term because they habitually set their lenses to that aperture to secure maximum image sharpness of both foreground and distance. 1936 marked the start of Weston’s series of nudes and sand dunes in Oceano, California, which are often considered some of his finest work.

He became the first photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship for experimental work in 1936. Following the receipt of this fellowship Weston spent the next two years taking photographs in the West and Southwest United States with assistant and future wife Charis Wilson.

In 1938 Weston moves to Wildcat Hill, Carmel Highlands CA, close to his beloved Point Lobos State Park and in 1939 marries Charis Wilson. Later, in 1941 using photographs of the East and South, Weston provided illustrations for a new edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

Edward Weston has been called "one of the most innovative and influential American photographers" and "one of the masters of 20th century photography." In 1947 he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and he stopped photographing soon thereafter. He spent the remaining ten years of his life overseeing the printing of more than 1,000 of his most famous images.

Brett Weston

Brett Weston (b. 1911 – d.1993) was the second of the four sons of photographer Edward Weston and Flora Chandler. He began taking photographs in 1925, while living in Mexico with Tina Modotti and his father. He began showing his photographs with Edward Weston in 1927, was featured at the international exhibition at Film und Foto in Germany at age 17, and mounted his first one-man museum retrospective at age 21 at the De Young Museum in San Francisco in January 1932.

Weston's earliest images from the 1920s reflect an intuitive and sophisticated sense of abstraction. He began photographing the dunes at Oceano, California, in the early 1930s. Brett preferred the high gloss papers and ensuing sharp clarity of the gelatin silver photographic materials of the f64 Group rather than the platinum matte photographic papers common in the 1920s and encouraged Edward Weston to explore the new silver papers in his own work.

Throughout the decades of the 1950s and 1970s, Brett Weston's style changed sharply and was characterized by high contrast, abstract imagery. The subjects he chose were, for the most part, not unlike what interested him early in his career; plant leaves, knotted roots and tangled kelp along the beach. He concentrated mostly on close-ups and abstracted details, but his prints reflected a preference for high contrast that reduced his subjects to a pure form.

 Brett Weston’s lifetime devotion and total involvement with the medium created a body of work and a contribution to photography that transcends comparisons to his father and has few equals in contemporary photography.

In November of 1996, Oklahoma City collector Christian Keesee acquired from the Brett Weston Estate the most complete body of Weston's work in existence. As one of the largest and most significant collections by an individual American photographer, The Brett Weston Archive, founded in 1997, serves as a resource for museums, collectors, historians, and publishers worldwide.

Cole Weston

After his discharge from the Navy in 1945 Cole worked for Life Magazine. In 1946 he moved to Carmel to assist his father Edward. During this time Eastman Kodak started sending their new color film, Kodachrome, for Edward to try out. Cole took this opportunity to experiment with this new medium and eventually became one of the world’s great masters of fine art color photography.

In 1957 Cole began shooting his first color photographs of the magnificent Big Sur coast, Monterey Peninsula and central California. At this time he carried on his own portrait business while assisting his ailing father, who passed away in 1958. Edward had authorized Cole to print from Edward’s negatives after his death, so Cole continued printing Edward’s work while pursuing his own fine art photography.

In 1975 Cole began lecturing and conducting workshops on his father’s photography as well as his own. With his work in the theater arts Cole was a natural when it came to teaching and lecturing and his many students still comment on what a great workshop he gave. He traveled throughout the United States, England, Europe, Russia, Mexico, New Zealand and the South Pacific photographing and inspiring others with his characteristic enthusiasm and charm.

In 1988 after three decades devoted to printing his father’s work, Cole at last set aside his responsibility to Edward’s legacy and refocused on his own photography. Cole had his first solo exhibition in San Francisco in 1971. Since then, his work has been featured in more than sixty exhibitions worldwide and has been collected by museums throughout the United States and Europe. His work has been featured in numerous gallery shows and publications with three monographs and numerous articles having been published on his exquisite photography. Michael Hoffman from Aperture Publications once quoted, “In the history of photography there are but a few masters of color photography, Cole Weston is assuredly one of these masters of the medium whose dramatic powerful images are a source of great joy and pleasure”. Cole passed away from natural causes on April 20th, 2003.

Like Cole, who once carried on the legacy of his father’s photography, his children have decided, as a tribute to their father, to carry on printing and to offer Trust prints of Cole’s fine color photographs. Cole Weston was a dedicated artist and master of fine photography. Hopefully the availability of modern prints will make it possible for photographic enthusiasts everywhere to continue to enjoy his life’s work.

© 2016 Biography courtesy of edward-weston.com

Kim Weston

As a young child, Kim thought it was normal and that everyone had a darkroom in his or her house. Being of a shy nature he loved hanging out in the darkroom. Kim’s first job was helping his father Cole Weston fix negatives, agitating the film and moving them from one side of the tank to the other. His first camera was a Rolleiflex, a medium format twin lens reflex (TLR) camera.

In Kim’s teenage years, he sailed on his father’s sailboat “Scaldis,” a fifty foot steel yacht that was harbored in the Monterey Bay.  He visited many ports, from North America to Central America, through the Panama Canal to Bermuda. He also sailed along the coast of South America, visited the Galapagos Islands, Hawaii and Tahiti. A Being afforded the experience of time on the open seas helped shape Kim’s good-natured disposition and his love for life.

When Kim reached his twenty’s, his main camera was a large format 4x5 Linhof - a gift from his uncle Brett Weston. He used this camera for many years with the focus shifting from photographing rocks and trees in the traditional Weston style to Nude Figure studies. Once when he was photographing a nude on Carmel beach, it started raining so he decided to take his model indoors. He painted a set in his studio, collected sand from the beach and photographed the model in the set. This event began his lifelong series of Nudes in the studio with painted sets.

During Kim’s late thirty’s he switched to a large format 8x10 Calumet film camera that was given to him by his father Cole. His series of studio nudes were becoming quite complex and often reflecting stories of his life. He would storyboard the whole series with drawings and stick figures, which represented the models. Sometimes he produced up to 15 photographs from one painted set series. For 15 years Kim would assist his uncle Brett Weston in the darkroom.

Now in his sixties, Kim works with a medium format Mamiya RB 67. He describes it as his “camera with wings” He loves the format, as it can be enlarged to a perfect 16x20. He prints 8x10, 11x14 and 16x20. He still shoots with film, develops his own work and prints in the darkroom. Kim does all of his post finishing work himself.

In addition to his work, Kim and his wife Gina, offer a number of photography workshops in and around the Carmel area and around the world. They also exclusively represent and sell Kim’s photographs, and also sell a select set of Edward Weston photographs from their private collection and private gallery in the Carmel Highlands of California. They have one son, Zachary Cole Weston.

Kim has lived in his grandfather, Edward Weston’s home for the past 27 years and is still “getting away with it.”

Gina Weston

Zach Weston

My name is Zach Weston and I am a photographer, teacher and the great grandson of famed photographer Edward Weston. My goal is to give students the ability to express themselves in an artistic way through photography. Developing the artistic mind is proven to be crucial in childhood development and I want to see every student have the ability to excel in life. As a 4th generation photographer, photography runs deep in my blood. After going to San Diego for college, the deep artistic roots of this area pulled me back and in 2017, I took over as ED of The Weston Collective. Since then, I have strived to widen our reach within our community by establishing our headquarters in Seaside, CA where we partnered with Martin Luther King Jr. School of the Arts, began teaching 5th graders darkroom photography and incorporated Santa Cruz County into our annual portfolio competition. It is my passion to keep the tradition of darkroom photography alive and see no better avenue then through our youth. I am excited for what the future brings and I hope you join us in the journey to build a better future.