ROCKFORD ART MUSEUM | COLLECTION | PHOTOGRAPHY

Brett Weston

Brett Weston first gained international recognition when his work was included in the 1929 exhibition Film und Foto, held in Stuttgart, Germany. There his photographs were shown alongside those of Edward Steichen, Bernice Abbott, Man Ray and his father, Edward Weston. He had begun photography 3 years earlier at the age of 15 as an apprentice to his father.

In the thirties, his style closely followed that of his father’s with soft light and dramatic compositions of cars, factories and the like. In 1936 Weston worked as a sculptor and photographer under the government’s Works Projects Administration and as a photographer for an aircraft factory before being drafted in 1941.

After the war, Weston established the photographic style that he is best known for. Landscapes and cityscapes that vary from the recognizable albeit dramatically composed to the pure hard edge abstraction. Chiaroscuro replaces the soft lighting and greyscale of earlier works. He finished his photographs in the dark room, considering the negative an intermediate step in the process and negating the concept of the photograph as an impartial documentarian.

In 1992, at the age of 80 and with much controversy, Weston decided to uphold a previous promise to burn his negatives, leaving only prints for posterity.