Edward Weston: Forms of Passion, Passion of Forms

Few photographers created such an enduring legacy as Edward Weston; few so profoundly influenced the techniques of what can rightly be called pure photography.

Beginning in 1911, when he opened his own portrait studio in California, and over the next four decades, Weston was a major force, constantly pushing the art of photography forward. Focusing on natural forms – the human figure, especially the nude female, seashells, plants, landscapes – he moved away from pictorialism and romanticism to produce a body of work that represented the new modernism, highly sophisticated in its imagery and style.

This book surveys Edward Weston's work more exhaustively than any previous work. A combination of biography and critical analysis, it contains more than 320 photographs meticulously reproduced in duotone. The vintage prints, selected from the Weston archives and the important Lane Collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, trace Weston's development from his early days to the final part of his career as a photographer, tragicallly cut short by the onset of Parkinson's disease.