In 1902, the year Edward Weston was given his first camera, few people regarded photography as more than a craft. But along with innovators like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, Weston revolutionized the ways photographers chose subject material and used photographic techniques to create what gradually came to be accepted as fine art.

This is an elegant book, designed and printed in Germany, with an essay by Terence Pitts, of the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona. It presents 180 of Weston's finest images, including many--such as the pines of Point Lobos, the sand dunes of Oceano, and his stark, unadorned nudes--that have become icons. Whereas the photographs of Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy were, to Weston's eyes, hopelessly mannered, his images are elemental, organic, and in harmony with nature's rhythms. Weston spent most of his working life in Mexico and California, and much of his work, replete with shadows, is illuminated with the harsh light of those places. In 1932, he and Ansel Adams founded the influential photographic collective Group f/64, named after the lens-aperture size that exposed an image at its most detailed and clear. This was Weston's aesthetic: to show the real world in its unrelieved integrity rather than create an imaginary construct. He was concerned with visual truth, not with character or storytelling. Weston was a true pioneer whose rigorous vision permanently changed the ways we see the world around us. --John Stevenson


From Library Journal
Blossfeldt, Sander, and Weston all blossomed with the publication of their first books around 1930, were direct in their use of the medium, and rank among photography's defining masters. Yet they each had a unique style and focused on distinct subject matter, making their works instantly recognizable. These three books, part of a new photography series from Taschen, are sufficiently monumental to honor the artists' talents but still convey their singular talents. Germans Sander and Blossfeldt pioneered the "new objectivity" with their massive survey projects. Sander set out to document all of society in hundreds of portraits, typically titled "Country Farmer Dressed for a Funeral" or "Middle-Class Family." The influence of his style, stern yet eminently humane, is more present than ever in current photography. A prominent collector and photography writer, Heiting has made excellent work of a difficult task selecting more than 100 of these portraits for inclusion and augmenting them with lesser-known architectural and landscape photographs. Blossfeldt originally photographed plant specimens to help his students in art school with copying natural forms. But with the publication of Art Forms in Nature (1928), containing 60 of these photogravures, he was hailed as master and went on to publish two more acclaimed compendia. Adam, a photography writer, offers stunning reproductions of all the prints found in all three of Blossfeldt's volumes as well as the original essays from the time. The Weston volume will give readers a new appreciation of his almost abstract nature studies and nudes. Heiting has again chosen exemplary works from Weston's more diverse oeuvre, combining well-known signature pieces with unexpected images. Terrence Pitts, director of the Center for Creative Photography, has added an especially well-researched essay to accompany the selections. These books are all well done, but based on the popularity of their work in the United States, Weston belongs in all public libraries, Sander in medium and large public libraries, and Blossfeldt in all libraries with a serious interest in photography; the entire series would be at home in any academic institution.ADoug McClemont, New York Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Karl Blossfeldt (1865^-1932) began collecting and photographing plants as an art student, then used his finely detailed and elegantly composed photographs as instructional materials during the three decades he taught art in Berlin, eventually publishing his work to great acclaim. Some 350 of his pristine and otherworldly black-and-white close-ups of plants are showcased here, accompanied by Adam's informative commentary. As Adam explains, Blossfeldt never considered himself a photographer in the artistic sense as he documented, "in a severely formal way," the wild plants he so assiduously gathered. But Blossfeldt's deliberately neutral and uniform approach makes for images of great delicacy and intricate beauty as the "minute particularities" of each plant--the whorls, textures, and architectural structures invisible to the casual observer--are revealed as fantastic and vivifying creations. This handsome volume would make a fine companion to Art Forms in Nature: The Prints of Ernst Haeckel , which presents the work of a similarly nature-struck contemporary of Blossfeldt's Donna Seaman


Language Notes
Text: English, French, German