Edward Weston

Edward Weston photographed peppers and shells and nudes until they stopped looking like themselves, and was the first photographer to win a Guggenheim Fellowship. He ran a portrait studio in California and made soft-focus Pictorialist work for years before abandoning it entirely around 1922, after seeing the Armour steelworks in Ohio and meeting Stieglitz in New York. What followed was the doctrine he is known for: previsualisation, contact printing from an 8x10 negative with no enlargement or cropping, and the smallest aperture he could manage - which is where the name of Group f/64 came from when he founded it with Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham in 1932. He spent three years in Mexico with Tina Modotti, who was his model, lover and then a photographer of consequence herself, and came back with a way of seeing objects as form. Pepper No. 30, made in 1930 in a tin funnel over four hours of exposure, is a vegetable that reads as a body. He photographed Point Lobos and Death Valley on the Guggenheim, and dunes at Oceano. Parkinson's disease stopped him working in 1948; his sons printed from his negatives under his direction for the last decade of his life. His daybooks, published later, are among the most quoted writings by any photographer. Tina Modotti later became a communist organiser in Mexico and Spain and died in Mexico City in 1942 in circumstances that were never settled. Weston married his student Charis Wilson, who wrote the Guggenheim application that won him the fellowship and much of the text published under his name. Point Lobos is now a state reserve and the stretch he worked is named for him. He asked to be cremated and his ashes scattered there.

• Lived: 1886 CE – 1958 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: artist