Monday, August 25, 2008

Edward Weston: Mexico

Edward Weston: Mexico
Phoenix Art Museum
Norton Photography Gallery
August 9, 2008 – November 15, 2008

Born in 1886, Edward Weston began his career practicing a popular photographic style called Pictorialism, creating portraits and nudes. The pieces with minimum contrast and soft-focus had a dream like quality. In 1923, an uninspiring and stagnate commercial portrait business prompted Weston to relocate to Mexico with Modotti. While there, he created innovative work exploring a modernist aesthetic characterized by sharp focused portraits, abstractions, and richly textured still lifes. Weston’s work was met with praise and recognition in the midst of the vibrant Mexican artistic culture.

This stunning collection of 60 photographs displays the local culture and scenery of Mexico in the 1920s – a rich period for the arts known as the Mexican Renaissance. Weston used a large camera to create technically accomplished black-and-white photos rich in detail and markedly abstract. Mexico allowed him to experiment with new subject matter, such as still lifes and landscapes, making this period one of the most pivotal of his career.

Current Exhibitions at the Phoenix Art Museum

1 comment:

iso camera said...

Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film.[1] Typically, a lens is used to focus the light reflected or emitted from objects into a real image on the light-sensitive surface inside a camera during a timed exposure. The result in an electronic image sensor is an electrical charge at each pixel, which is electronically processed and stored in a digital image file for subsequent display or processing. The result in a photographic emulsion is an invisible latent image, which is later chemically developed into a visible image, either negative or positive depending on the purpose of the photographic material and the method of processing. A negative image on film is traditionally used to photographically create a positive image on a paper base, known as a print, either by using an enlarger or by contact printing.