Edward Weston

Edward Henry Weston (1886 to 1958) was an American photographer called one of the most innovative and influential American photographers and one of the masters of twentieth-century photography. Over a forty-year career he photographed an increasingly expansive range of subjects, including landscapes, still lifes, nudes, portraits and genre scenes, moving from the soft-focus pictorialism popular early in his career to become one of the foremost champions of highly detailed, sharply focused photographic images, developing what has been described as a quintessentially American and especially Californian approach to modern photography. In 1937 he became the first photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, producing nearly 1,400 negatives over the following two years, including some of his most famous images of the trees and rocks at Point Lobos, California, before Parkinson's disease ended his photographic career in 1947.