Edward Weston: The Form of the Nude (Monographs)

Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Photography & Video

Edward Weston: The Form of the Nude (Monographs) Details

Edward Weston (1886-1958) is one of the seminal figures of American twentieth-century photography. His series of nudes, landscapes and close-up still-lifes defined modernist photography in their formal elegance, simplicity and abstraction. The selection and pairing of the photographs in this book demonstrate Weston's fascination with the nude and its relationship with the other natural and abstract forms that he photographed. A concise and authoritative introduction to Weston's work, this book features some of Weston's best-known pictures - including the beautiful, celebrated nude studies of Tina Modotti and Charles Wilson and his remarkable still-lifes - as well as many lesser-known, but no less engaging, works.

Reviews

Amy Conger has produced a beautiful collection of Weston's photos, selected form about 25 years of his work. As the title suggests, most of these are wonderful figure studies. The remaining few are still-lifes or landscapes. Many of these, like the shells p.48, pepper p.69, or radish p.74 present the same curves and compositions as his nudes.In part, these help to bring out a geometric contrast that seemed to fascinate Weston: the merger of flowing curves of figure with harsher, angular geometries. One (p.70) creates a square frame of crossed arms containing the roundness of the model's breasts. Others show the elegant gawkiness of knees and elbows (p.75, 91), or the columnar architecture (p.77) of the body's supporting members. Two photos (pp. 102, 103) present a generously rounded black model, coincidentally named Weston - just enough to leave me hoping for more, in contrast to Weston's more common work with slender, light-skinned women.Although I enjoy this book immensely, one thing about it baffles me. For some reason, Conger's publisher chose to use the same format and cover photo (Nude, Bertha Wardell) as a much earlier book by Charis Wilson - something that could easily fool potential readers into mistaking one for the other. It's not that Conger was unaware of Wilson's book, in fact Conger notes it in her bibliography. I guess I'll never know.Or need to. It's a great collection anyway. Conger's brief biographical note at the beginning (echoed in Spanish at the end) was helpful, but the pictures truly speak for themselves.//wiredweird

Share this post