Brett Weston
Brett Weston (1911–1993, born Los Angeles, California) was a photographer widely regarded as one of the most gifted and technically accomplished practitioners in the history of American photography, whose career began under the tutelage of his father, Edward Weston, and developed into a body of work of remarkable formal independence and visual intelligence. At thirteen, Brett accompanied his father to Mexico, where he was introduced to photography and to the revolutionary artistic circles of the day, an education that combined craft, modernism, and the influence of the Mexican muralists in ways that would shape his visual sensibility for life.
By the age of seventeen he had been included in the landmark international Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart, and at twenty-one he mounted his first solo museum retrospective at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, credentials that announced a prodigious and fully formed artistic intelligence. Throughout a career spanning over six decades, Weston pursued an increasingly abstract approach to photography, favouring close-up studies of organic forms, plant life, and natural textures rendered in high-contrast prints of exceptional clarity and tonal richness. His preference for high-gloss gelatin silver papers, at a time when matte surfaces were prevalent, gave his prints a sharpness and luminosity entirely his own.
His work is held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.