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Born in 1886 in Highland Park, Illinois, Weston started taking photographs of his aunt’s farm and the parks of Chicago at age 16, using a Kodak No. 2 Bull's Eye camera given to him by his father. In his early 20s he worked door-to-door, taking pictures of children, pets and funerals. Keen on making his photography something more than a local service for pocket change, he enrolled himself at the Illinois School of Photography, completing a year-long course in just six months. Following a short-term job as a retoucher, Weston took a post at the Louis A. Mojoiner portrait studio. His work immediately became more ambitious and soon he became known for his skill in lighting and posing his subjects. In 1911 Weston opened his own studio in Tropico, California (where he worked for the next 20 years), and grew famous for his early portraits in the pictorialist style—an aesthetic movement that aspired to elevate the art of photography to the level of painting through the use of soft focus, filters, lens coatings and manipulation in the darkroom. The effect was moody and impressionistic, and often romantic in a gauzy way.

 

In 1922 Weston broke ranks with the pictorialists and embarked on a project that would make his name as a photographic innovator. He began photographing a series of "straight" or unmanipulated photographs of the smoke stack of Armco Steel, an Ohio industrial plant. Influenced by the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz, the sculptures of Brancusi and the paintings of Georgia O’Keefe and Diego Rivera, Weston became preoccupied with the beauty of the abstract form, what he called the "quintessence" of things. The dark-room tricks of the pictorialists seemed unnecessary when there was so much inspiration to be found in the smooth lines and angles of the natural and industrial world.

 

This fascination with a subject's quintessence informs much of the work in the new exhibition. Two prints of shells, photographed in 1927 against a dark background, glow with a sculptural fragility. "Eggplant" (1929) and "Pepper" (1930) are also powerful explorations of form, their sensuous curves as mesmerising as his nude portraits of the female body. Textural clarity springs out of "Stump, Moonstone Beach" (1937), an elemental portrait of gnarled trees, which is cleverly hung next to "Abandoned Shoes, Alabama Hills" (1937), a portrait of a pair of discarded work boots, their twisted soles echoing the grain of the decaying wood.

 

But it is "Oceano" (1936) that best captures Weston's desire for simplicity of form. This landscape of Californian sand dunes, with its inky blocks of black and sinuous curving bars of sand, embraces both realism and abstraction. It is a perfect example of Weston's work in making photography a fine art.