Edward Weston (1886/Chicago-1958/Carmel), brought photography out of the Victorian age and revolutionized the form by making it modernist in every sense of the word. A humble man who was devoted to his sons Brett and Cole, Weston’s approach to photographing elemental landscapes, nudes and still lifes was, in his words, “to make the commonplace unusual.”  

When he turned his camera on an ordinary green pepper, he made it look like a modernist sculpture by his contemporary, Jean Arp. In his journal, he wrote, "It is classic, completely satisfying – a pepper – but more than a pepper: abstract, in that it is completely outside subject matter." 

He continued, writing that something as ordinary and as extraordinary as a pepper "takes one beyond the world we know in the conscious mind." It was his aim to use his camera as a means to express "the very substance and the quintessence of the thing itself."

Toward the end of his life, Weston made a selection of 830 photographs he felt were representative of his life’s work, which were printed between 1953 and 1954 under his direction by Brett Weston.

Among them is the landscape, above, which he shot in 1937 but had never previously published. It was first shown in 1960 in an exhibition of works from this selection at the Art Institute of Chicago, which owns more than 200 Weston photographs and over 2,500 related items from the photographer's archives. Info

Top: Edward Weston, Tomato Field, 1937, printed 1953/54 by Brett Weston. Gift of Max McGraw, 1959.713, The Art Institute of Chicago.

Above left: Pepper, 1930, printed 1953/54, printed 1953/54. Gift of Max McGraw, 1959.665.