Brett Weston American, 1911-1993

Brett Weston (1911–1993) was the second son of Edward Weston and, of the four Weston boys, the one who came closest to his father as an artist. He was also, from the beginning, a fiercely independent child. At thirteen, his father took him out of school to serve as his apprentice in Mexico City, where the two lived among Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jean Charlot. It was there that Brett began photographing with his father’s small Graflex.

His exposure to modern art was formative, sharpening an already pronounced interest in form. He was drawn to what the camera could do to a subject seen at close range, and to the way black and white could strip an object of its ordinary appearance. This movement toward abstraction would remain a defining force throughout a career of nearly seventy years. Weston was explicit about the importance of painting and sculpture to his practice, considering them more influential than photography: he regarded Georgia O’Keeffe as the greatest American painter, admired the Blue Four, and was deeply moved by the sculpture of Brâncuși and Henry Moore. He also carved wood himself from an early age.

Weston returned to California in 1926 and assisted his father at the Glendale portrait studio while exhibiting and selling his own work. In 1929, he moved with his father to Carmel. That same year, eighteen of his prints were included in Film und Foto in Stuttgart, one of the most important avant-garde exhibitions held between the wars; he was seventeen. He maintained a studio in Los Angeles, was stationed in New York with the army, and travelled to photograph in South America, Europe, Japan, Alaska and Hawaii. A Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947 took him along the East Coast, after which he returned to Carmel to help his ailing father.

Beginning in 1938, Weston issued his photographs in portfolios, fourteen in all, each containing between ten and twenty prints. From 1950 to 1980, the work became increasingly abstract. The subjects remained largely consistent—leaves, knotted roots, tangled kelp—but Weston moved closer to them, using scale and contrast to transform the natural world into pure graphic form.

He spent much of his final two decades on the island of Hawaii. On his eightieth birthday, in December 1991, he burned the greater part of sixty years of negatives, retaining only a few of historical value. His reasoning was uncompromising: nobody else could print the negatives as he did, and a print made by another hand would not be his work. He died at Kona in 1993. In 1996, the remaining body of work passed from his estate to the collector Christian Keesee, who gave three hundred and sixty photographs to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art between 2004 and 2011.

Brett Weston’s work has been shown at Bruce Silverstein Gallery in TOPOGRAPHICS: Photographs from 1844 to the Present (2004) and Discoveries (2009).