MADRID.- Fundación MAPFRE presents Edward Weston. The Matter of Forms, an exhibition devoted to over five decades of work by this American artist, one of the most influential figures in modern photography.

Weston’s work, deeply rooted in the American landscape and cultural history, offer —through its extreme simplicity and originality— a unique perspective on the consolidation of photography as an art form and its prominent role in the context of modern visual culture. The exhibition is conceived as a retrospective spanning the different phases of the artist’s photographic production. From his early pictorialist influences to his establishment as a central figure in the affirmation of photography’s poetic and intellectual potential through the lens of straight photography. A pioneer of modern photographic style, Weston is known for his use of a large-format camera, creating richly detailed, sharply focused black-and-white images.

His mastery of technique, coupled with a deep reverence for nature and form, led to a body of work that includes iconic still lifes, nudes, landscapes, and portraits. A cofounder of Group f/64, Weston’s photographs are key to understanding the emerging aesthetic and life- style of interwar America.

Edward Weston was born on March 24, 1886, in Highland Park, Illinois. At the age of 20, he moved to California and published his first photograph. By 1911, he had opened his own studio in Tropico and soon began exhibiting his work in various national and inter- national photography salons, winning numerous awards. He helped found the Camera Pictorialists of Los Angeles. A few years later, he began experimenting with abstract angles and lighting variations. In 1923, Weston traveled to Mexico City with his son Chandler and photographer Tina Modotti, where he also opened a studio. In 1927, he produced an important series of nudes, and excerpts of his diaries were published in Creative Art magazine. Two years later, he established his photography studio in Carmel. In 1934, he photographed the Oceano Dunes in California for the first time, and the following year, he took what is perhaps his most famous photograph: a nude of his second wife, Charis Wilson. In 1937, Edward Weston became the first photographer ever to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In 1941, he was commissioned to illustrate Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a project that took him on a journey across the United States until it was interrupted on December 7 by the attack on Pearl Harbor. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1945, Weston had a major retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York the following year, featuring a total of 250 photographs. His son Cole moved to Carmel to assist him and print his work. In 1948, as his illness progressed, Weston took his final photograph at Point Lobos. In the years that followed, several books of his work were published, and a retrospective exhibition opened at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris. He died on January 1, 1958, at Wildcat Hill, and his ashes were scattered at what is now Weston Beach in Point Lobos.