Edward Weston: Still Life Photographs

Edward Weston, one of the most respected and influential photographers of the twentieth century, worked in both California and Mexico on his most famous themes: landscapes, nudes, and extreme close-ups of shells and vegetables. Weston expressed his philosophy clearly: "Clouds, torsos, shells, peppers, trees, rocks, smokestacks, are but interdependent, interrelated parts of a whole which is life. Light rhythms, felt in no matter what, become symbols of the whole." This exhibition explores Weston's penetrating vision of nature seen close-up.

Formally, the exactitude with which he controlled light, and the richness of his tonal structures,— has never been exceeded. His quest was for not only beauty of form, but for the spiritual reality that visible beauty evokes. As he expressed it, Weston wanted to take the beholder "beyond the world we know with the conscious mind...into an inner reality—the absolute—with a clear understanding, a mystic revealment."