Flame of Recognition

Integrating revealing excerpts from Edward Weston's diaries and letters with some of his most exquisite photographs, Nancy Newhall sheds light on Weston's own attempts to "understand the range flashes of vision that came through his camera". Edward Weston, born in 1886, made his first photographs in 1902 with a Kodak Bull's Eye No 2 camera given to him by his father. He opened his own portrait studio in 1911, but did not fully come into his own as an artist until his 1922 photographs of the Armco Steel Mill. Working in Mexico and California in the 1920s he continued to support himself with portrait work while turning increasingly to subjects of his own choosing. From 1937 to 1939 he travelled and photographed throughout the American West on a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1948 Weston made his last photograph - he had been stricken with Parkinson's disease several years earlier. On 1st January 1958 he died at his home in Cornel.