Edward Cole and Kim Weston : Three Generations of American Photography Book

Three generations of American photography - by a family that, like no otber, has influenced the history of international photography, the photographic scene around the world, and its technical perfection. Edward Weston, the father of Cole and the grand-father of Kim, has become a legend as a photographer. In the early twenties he had already created a sensation with his soft, clay-colored studies whose artistic subject matter reminds one of the "Photo Secession" founded by Alfred Stieglitz in 1902. Edward Weston's purist studies of bodies, of landscapes, of fruit, vegetables, and other commonplace things propagate the pure, unmanipulated photograph with a tendency towards abstraction. Joint experiments with the new developments in color photography helped Cole Weston to realize quickly that color afforded him new lighting possibilities. It gave him the possibility to create his own identity and to step out of his father's black and white shadow. Cole Weston perfected his work to such an extent that today he is known as a pioneer in the field of artistic color photography. Kim Weston has broken with the Weston tradition of objectivity. His studio work is always staged and recalls a style characteristic of the surrealists in the twenties and the thirties. The black and white scenarios have an allegorical character; they comment on the human society and the rat race of modern times so that they almost form an antithesis to the landscape photography of his father.