Edward Weston American, 1886-1958 Edward Weston was one of the most influential proponents of straight photography in America. Born in Highland Park, Illinois, he made his first photographs in 1902 with a Kodak camera given to him by his father. Four years later he settled in California, supporting himself as a portrait photographer. After attending the Illinois College of Photography, he opened a studio in Tropico (now Glendale), California, in 1911. Initially, Weston made photographs in the soft-focus pictorial style. In the early 1920s, however, his work began to become more sharply focused, with a greater emphasis on form and composition. Among the earliest examples of this new approach are his 1922 photographs of the Armco steel mill in Middletown, Ohio. Over the next few years he continued to experiment with this new style, working in Mexico and then San Francisco. A master of lighting and composition, Weston began a series of closeup studies of shells and vegetables in 1927, creating the clearly focused, detailed images for which he became famous. In 1932 Weston joined Ansel Adams, Willard Van Dyke, Imogen Cunningham, and others in founding Group f/64, which advocated straight, unmanipulated photography. Five years later he received the first fellowship awarded to a photographer by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The fellowship was renewed in 1938 and allowed Weston to travel and photograph throughout California and the western United States. Working slowly and methodically with large-format cameras, Weston continued to produce sharply focused contact prints until 1948, when Parkinson's disease forced him to give up photography. In subsequent years Weston's sons, Brett and Cole, worked under his supervision to make prints from his negatives. M.M.