Willard Van Dyke (5 December 1906 – 23 January 1986) was an American filmmaker and photographer who believed that photography could have a major influence on the world.

Willard Van Dyke apprenticed with Edward Weston in 1928 and co-founded the Group f/64 in 1932 with Imogen Cunningham, Ansel Adams, and Weston. The group believed in sharp-focus, "straight photography."

In 1935, Van Dyke moved to New York City and began making documentary films with the belief that films "could change the world." His name soon became synonymous with social documentary in the U.S. His images of cottonfields, steelmills and industrial towns, and his portraits of unemployed factory workers and their families, provide an invaluable chronicle of those years and have become timeless examples of cinematic art. He was a cinematographer on Pare Lorentz's The River (1938).

The City, his 1938 collaboration with Ralph Steiner, ran for two years at the 1939 New York World's Fair. During World War II, he produced propaganda movies for the government. In 1948, Van Dyke made the documentary film The Photographer about Edward Weston.

He successfully fought attempts to blacklist him during the 1950s. Van Dyke was director of the Department of Film at the Museum of Modern Art from 1965 to 1974.

In 1967 he was a member of the jury at the 17th Berlin International Film Festival.^[1]

In 1960 he was nominated for an Academy Award in the Category of Best Short Subject, Live Action Subjects for: Skyscraper (1960); shared with Shirley Clarke and Irving Jacoby.

In 1978, Van Dyke was awarded The George Eastman Award, given by George Eastman House for distinguished contribution to the art of film.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Willard Van Dyke at the Internet Movie Database

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This article about an American photographer is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Woody Guthrie
Woody Guthrie with guitar labeled "This Machine Kills Fascists"
Background information
Birth name	Woodrow Wilson Guthrie
Born	(1912-07-14)July 14, 1912 Okemah, Oklahoma, United States
Died	October 3, 1967(1967-10-03) (aged 55) New York City, New York, United States
Genres	Folk, protest song, country
Occupations	Singer-songwriter
Instruments	Vocals, guitar, harmonica, mandolin, fiddle
Years active	1930–1956
Associated acts	Almanac Singers
Notable instruments
Martin 000-18, Gibson Southern Jumbo, Gibson J-45

Woodrow Wilson "Woody" Guthrie (July 14, 1912 – October 3, 1967) is best known as an American singer-songwriter and folk musician, whose musical legacy includes hundreds of political, traditional and children's songs, ballads and improvised works. He frequently performed with the slogan This Machine Kills Fascists displayed on his guitar. His best-known song is "This Land Is Your Land." Many of his recorded songs are archived in the Library of Congress.^[1] Such songwriters as Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp, Pete Seeger, Joe Strummer, Billy Bragg and Tom Paxton have acknowledged Guthrie as a major influence.

Guthrie traveled with migrant workers from Oklahoma to California and learned traditional folk and blues songs. Many of his songs are about his experiences in the Dust Bowl era during the Great Depression, earning him the nickname the "Dust Bowl Troubadour."^[2] Throughout his life Guthrie was associated with United States communist groups, though he was seemingly not a member of any.^[3]

Guthrie was married three times and fathered eight children, including American folk musician Arlo Guthrie. He is the grandfather of musician Sarah Lee Guthrie.^[4] Guthrie died from complications of Huntington's disease, a progressive genetic neurological disorder. During his later years, in spite of his illness, Guthrie served as a figurehead in the folk movement, providing inspiration to a generation of new folk musicians, including mentor relationships with Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan.

Woody Guthrie was inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame in 1997.

Biography[link]

Early life: 1912–30[link]

Woody Guthrie's Okfuskee County, Oklahoma, childhood home as it appeared in 1979

Guthrie was born in Okemah, a small town in Okfuskee County, Oklahoma, the son of Nora Belle (née Sherman) and Charles Edward Guthrie.^[4] His parents named him after Woodrow Wilson, then Governor of New Jersey and the Democratic candidate soon to be elected President of the United States.

Charles Guthrie was an industrious businessman, owning at one time up to 30 plots of land in Okfuskee County. He was actively involved in Oklahoma politics and was a Democratic candidate for office in the county. When Charles was making stump speeches, he would often be accompanied by his son.^[5] Charles Guthrie was involved in the 1911 lynching of Laura and Lawrence Nelson. His son wrote three songs about the event and said that his father was later a member of the revived Ku Klux Klan.^[6]

Guthrie's early family life was affected by several fires, including one that caused the loss of his family's home in Okemah. His sister Clara later died in a coal-oil (used for heating) fire when Guthrie was seven, and Guthrie's father was severely burned in a subsequent coal-oil fire.^[7] The circumstances of these fires, especially that in which Charley was injured, remain unclear. It is unknown whether they were accidents or the result of actions by Guthrie's mother Nora, who was afflicted with Huntington's disease, although the family did not know this at the time. It leads to dementia as well as muscular effects.^[8]

Nora Guthrie was eventually committed to the Oklahoma Hospital for the Insane, where she died in 1930 from Huntington's disease. Judging from the circumstances of her father's death by drowning, researchers suspect that George Sherman suffered from the same hereditary disease.^[9]

When Nora Guthrie was institutionalized, Woody Guthrie was 14. His father Charley was living and working in Pampa, Texas, to repay his debts from unsuccessful real estate deals. Woody and his siblings were on their own in Oklahoma; they relied on their eldest brother Roy for support. The 14-year-old Woody Guthrie worked odd jobs around Okemah, begging meals and sometimes sleeping at the homes of family friends. According to one story, Guthrie made friends with an African-American blues harmonica player named "George", whom he would watch play at the man's shoe shine booth. Before long, Guthrie bought his own harmonica and began playing along with him. In another interview 14 years later, Guthrie claimed he learned how to play harmonica from a boyhood friend, John Woods, and that his earlier story about the shoe-shining player was false.^[10]

He seemed to have a natural affinity for music and easily learned to "play by ear." He began to use his musical skills around town, playing a song for a sandwich or coins.^[11] Guthrie easily learned old ballads and traditional English & Scots songs from the parents of friends. Although he did not excel as a student (he dropped out of high school in his fourth year and did not graduate), his teachers described him as bright. He was an avid reader on a wide range of topics. Friends recall his reading constantly.^[12]

Eventually, Guthrie's father sent for his son to come to Texas, but little changed for the aspiring musician. Guthrie, then 18, was reluctant to attend high school classes in Pampa and spent much time learning songs by busking on the streets and reading in the library at Pampa's city hall. He was growing as a musician, gaining practice by regularly playing at dances with his father's half-brother Jeff Guthrie, a fiddle player. At the library, he wrote a manuscript summarizing everything he had read on the basics of psychology. A librarian in Pampa shelved this manuscript under Guthrie's name, but it was later lost in a library reorganization.^[12]

1930s: traveling[link]

At age 19, Guthrie met and married his first wife, Mary Jennings, with whom he had three children,^[13] Gwendolyn, Sue, and Bill, all of whom would later die prematurely. With the advent of the Dust Bowl era, Guthrie left Texas, leaving Mary behind, and joined the thousands of Okies who were migrating to California looking for work. Many of his songs are concerned with the conditions faced by these working class people.

California[link]

During the late part of that decade, he achieved fame with radio partner Maxine "Lefty Lou" Crissman as a broadcast performer of commercial "hillbilly" music and traditional folk music.^[15] Guthrie was making enough money to send for his family, who were still living in Texas. While appearing on the commercial radio station KFVD, owned by a populist-minded New Deal Democrat Frank W. Burke, Guthrie began to write and perform some of the protest songs that would eventually appear on Dust Bowl Ballads.

It was at KFVD that Guthrie met newscaster Ed Robbin. Robbin was impressed with a song Guthrie wrote about Thomas Mooney, believed by many to be a wrongly convicted man who was, at the time, a leftist cause célèbre.^[16] Robbin, who became Guthrie's political mentor, introduced Guthrie to socialists and communists in Southern California, including Will Geer. He remained Guthrie's lifelong friend, and helped Guthrie book benefit performances in the communist circles in Southern California. Notwithstanding Guthrie's later claim that "the best thing that I did in 1936 was to sign up with the Communist Party,"^[17] he was never a member of the Party. He was noted as a fellow traveler—an outsider who agreed with the platform of the party while not subject to party discipline.^[18] Guthrie requested to write a column for the Communist newspaper, The Daily Worker. The column, titled "Woody Sez," appeared a total of 174 times from May 1939 to January 1940. "Woody Sez" was not explicitly political, but was about current events as observed by Guthrie. He wrote the columns in an exaggerated hillbilly dialect and usually included a small comic;^[19] they were published as a collection after Guthrie's death.^{[dead link][3]} Steve Earle said of Guthrie, "I don't think of Woody Guthrie as a political writer. He was a writer who lived in very political times."^[20]

With the outbreak of World War II and the nonaggression pact the Soviet Union had signed with Germany in 1939, the owners of KFVD radio did not want its staff "spinning apologia" for the Soviet Union. Both Robbin and Guthrie left the station.^[21] Without the daily radio show, his prospects for employment diminished, and Guthrie and his family returned to Pampa, Texas. Although Mary Guthrie was happy to return to Texas, the wanderlusting Guthrie soon after accepted Will Geer's invitation to New York City and headed east.

1940s: building a legacy[link]

New York City[link]

Arriving in New York, Guthrie, known as "the Oklahoma cowboy," was embraced by its leftist folk music community. For a time, he slept on a couch in Will Geer's apartment. Guthrie made his first recordings—several hours of conversation and songs recorded by the folklorist Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress—as well as an album, Dust Bowl Ballads, for Victor Records in Camden, New Jersey.^[22]

	"This Land is Your Land" noicon Sample of Woody Guthrie's song, "This Land is Your Land"
Problems listening to this file? See media help.

Guthrie was tired of the radio overplaying Irving Berlin's "God Bless America." He thought the lyrics were unrealistic and complacent.^[23] Partly inspired by his experiences during a cross-country trip and his distaste for "God Bless America," he wrote his most famous song, "This Land Is Your Land," in February 1940; it was subtitled "God Blessed America for Me." The melody is adapted from an old gospel song, "Oh My Loving Brother." This was best known as "When The World's On Fire," sung by the country group The Carter Family. Guthrie signed the manuscript with the comment, "All you can write is what you see, Woody G., N.Y., N.Y., N.Y."^[24] He protested against class inequality in the fourth and sixth verses:

As I went walking, I saw a sign there,

And on the sign there, It said "no trespassing." [In another version, the sign reads "Private Property"]

But on the other side, it didn't say nothing!

That side was made for you and me.

In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;

By the relief office, I'd seen my people.

As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,

Is this land made for you and me?

These verses were often omitted in subsequent recordings, sometimes by Guthrie. Although the song was written in 1940, it was four years before he recorded it for Moses Asch in April 1944.,^[25] Sheet music was not produced and given to schools by Howie Richmond until later.^[26]

In March 1940, Guthrie was invited to play at a benefit hosted by The John Steinbeck Committee to Aid Farm Workers, to raise money for migrant workers. There he met the folksinger Pete Seeger, and the two men became good friends.^[27] Later, Seeger accompanied Guthrie back to Texas to meet other members of the Guthrie family. He recalled an awkward conversation with Mary Guthrie's mother, in which she asked for Seeger's help to persuade Guthrie to treat her daughter better.^[28]

Guthrie had some success in New York at this time as a guest on CBS's radio program Back Where I Come From and used his influence to get a spot on the show for his friend Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter. Ledbetter's Tenth Street apartment was a gathering spot for the leftwing musician circle in New York at the time, and Guthrie and Ledbetter were good friends, as they had busked together at bars in Harlem.^[29]

In September 1940 Guthrie was invited by the Model Tobacco Company to host their radio program, Pipe Smoking Time. Guthrie was paid $180 a week, an impressive salary in 1940.^[30] He was finally making enough money to send regular payments back to Mary. He also brought her and the children to New York, where the family lived briefly in an apartment on Central Park West. The reunion represented Woody's desire to be a better father and husband. He said "I have to set ['sic'] real hard to think of being a dad."^[30] Guthrie quit after the seventh broadcast, claiming he had begun to feel the show was too restrictive when he was told what to sing.^[31] Disgruntled with New York, Guthrie packed up Mary and his children in a new car and headed west to California.^[32]

Pacific Northwest[link]

In May 1941, after a brief stay in Los Angeles, Guthrie moved the family north to Washington state on the promise of a job. Gunther von Fritsch was directing a documentary about the Bonneville Power Administration's construction of the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River, and needed a narrator. Alan Lomax had recommended Guthrie to narrate the film and sing songs onscreen. The original project was expected to take 12 months, but as filmmakers became worried about casting such a political figure, they minimized Guthrie's role. The Department of the Interior hired him for one month to write songs about the Columbia River and the construction of the federal dams for the documentary's soundtrack. Guthrie toured the Columbia River and the Pacific Northwest. Guthrie said he "couldn't believe it, it's a paradise",^[33] which appeared to inspire him creatively. In one month Guthrie wrote 26 songs, including three of his most famous: "Roll On Columbia", "Pastures of Plenty", and "Grand Coulee Dam".^[34] The surviving songs were released as Columbia River Songs. The film was never completed and was released only in a limited form.

At the conclusion of the month in Oregon and Washington, Guthrie wanted to return to New York. Tired of the continual uprooting, Mary Guthrie told him to go without her and the children.^[35] Although Guthrie would see Mary again, once on a tour through Los Angeles with the Almanac Singers, it was essentially the end of their marriage. Divorce was difficult, since Mary was a member of the Catholic Church, but she reluctantly agreed in December 1943.^[36]

Woody Guthrie, 1943

Almanac Singers[link]

Following the conclusion of his work in Washington State, Guthrie corresponded with Pete Seeger about Seeger's newly formed folk-protest group, the Almanac Singers. Guthrie returned to New York with plans to tour the country as a member of the group.^[37] The singers originally worked out of a loft in New York City hosting regular concerts called "hootenannys", a word Pete and Woody had picked up in their cross-country travels. The singers eventually outgrew the space and moved into the cooperative Almanac House in Greenwich Village.

Initially Guthrie helped write and sing what the Almanacs Singers termed "peace" songs; while the Nazi-Soviet Pact was in effect, until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Communist line was that World War II was a capitalist fraud. After Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, the group wrote anti-fascist songs. The members of the Almanac Singers and residents of the Almanac House were a loosely defined group of musicians, though the 'core' members included Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Millard Lampell and Lee Hays. In keeping with common socialist ideals, meals, chores and rent at the Almanac House were shared. The Sunday hootenannys were good opportunities to collect donation money for rent. Songs written in the Almanac House had shared songwriting credits among all the members, although in the case of "Union Maid", members would later state that Guthrie wrote the song, ensuring that his children would receive residuals.^[38]

In the Almanac House, Guthrie added authenticity to their work, since he was a "real" working-class Oklahoman. "There was the heart of America personified in Woody....And for a New York Left that was primarily Jewish, first or second generation American, and was desperately trying to get Americanized, I think a figure like Woody was of great, great importance", a friend of the group, Irwin Silber, would say.^[39] Woody routinely emphasized his working-class image, rejected songs he felt were not in the country blues vein he was familiar with, and rarely contributed to household chores. House member Agnes "Sis" Cunningham, another Okie, would later recall that Woody, "loved people to think of him as a real working class person and not an intellectual".^[40] Guthrie contributed songwriting and authenticity in much the same capacity for Pete Seeger's post-Almanac Singers project People's Songs, a newsletter and booking organization for labor singers, founded in 1945.^[41]

[edit] Bound for Glory

Guthrie was a prolific writer, penning thousands of pages of unpublished poems and prose, many written while living in New York City. After a recording session with Alan Lomax, Lomax suggested Guthrie write an autobiography. Lomax thought Guthrie's descriptions of growing up were some of the best accounts he had read of American childhood.^[42] During this time Guthrie met Marjorie Mazia, a dancer in New York who would become his second wife. Mazia was an instructor at the prestigious Martha Graham Dance School, where she was assisting Sophie Maslow with her piece Folksay. Based on the folklore and poetry collected by Carl Sandburg, Folksay included the adaptation of some of Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads for the dance.^[43] Guthrie continued to write songs and began work on his autobiography. The end product, Bound For Glory was completed due to the patient editing assistance of Mazia and was first published by E.P. Dutton in 1943.^[44] It is vividly told in the artist's down-home dialect, with the flair and imagery of a true storyteller. Library Journal complained about the "Too careful reproduction of illiterate speech."^[45] But Clifton Fadiman, reviewing the book in the New York Times, paid the author a fine tribute: "Some day people are going to wake up to the fact that Woody Guthrie and the ten thousand songs that leap and tumble off the strings of his music box are a national possession like Yellowstone and Yosemite, and part of the best stuff this country has to show the world."^[45] A film adaptation of Bound for Glory was released in 1976.^[46]

The Asch recordings[link]

In 1944, Guthrie met Moses "Moe" Asch of Folkways Records, for whom he first recorded "This Land Is Your Land". Over the next few years, he recorded "Worried Man Blues", along with hundreds of other songs. These recordings would later be released by Folkways and Stinson Records, which had joint distribution rights.^[47] The Folkways recordings are available (through the Smithsonian Institute online shop); the most complete series of these sessions, culled from dates with Asch, is titled The Asch Recordings.

World War II years[link]

Guthrie believed performing his anti-fascist songs and poems at home was the best use of his talents; Guthrie lobbied the United States Army to accept him as a USO performer instead of conscripting him as a soldier in the draft. When Guthrie's attempts failed, his friends Cisco Houston and Jim Longhi pressured Guthrie to join the U.S. Merchant Marine.^[48] Guthrie followed their advice: he served as a mess man and dishwasher and frequently sang for the crew and troops to buoy their spirits on transatlantic voyages. Guthrie made attempts to write about his experience in the Merchant Marine but was never satisfied with the results. Longhi later wrote about these experiences in his book Woody, Cisco and Me.^[49] The book offers a rare first-hand account of Guthrie during his Merchant Marine service. In 1945, Guthrie's association with communism made him ineligible for further service in the Merchant Marine, and he was drafted into the U.S. Army.^[50]

While he was on furlough from the Army, Guthrie and Marjorie were married.^[51] After his discharge, they moved into a house on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island and over time had four children. One of their children, Cathy, died as a result of a fire at age four, sending Guthrie into a serious depression.^[52] Their other children were Joady, Nora and Arlo. Arlo followed in his father's footsteps as a singer-songwriter. During this period, Guthrie wrote and recorded Songs to Grow on for Mother and Child, a collection of children's music, which includes the song "Goodnight Little Arlo (Goodnight Little Darlin')", written when Arlo was about nine years old.

A 1948 crash of a plane carrying 28 Mexican farm workers from Oakland, California, in deportation back to Mexico inspired Woody to write "Deportee (Plane Wreck At Los Gatos)".^[53]

In 1949 Guthrie's music was featured in the film Columbia River;^[54] Guthrie had been commissioned in 1941 to provide songs for the project, but it had been postponed due to WWII.^[55]

Mermaid Avenue[link]

This page from a collection of Guthrie's sheet music published in 1946 includes his Mermaid Avenue address and one of his anti-fascist slogans

The years living on Mermaid Avenue were among Guthrie's most productive periods as a writer. His extensive writings from this time were archived and maintained by Marjorie and later his estate, mostly handled by Guthrie's daughter, Nora. Several of the manuscripts contain scribblings by a young Arlo and the other Guthrie offspring.^[56]

During this time Ramblin' Jack Elliott studied extensively under Guthrie, visiting his home and observing how he wrote and performed. Elliott, like Bob Dylan later, idolized Guthrie and was inspired by his idiomatic performance style and repertoire. Due to Guthrie's suffering Huntington's disease, Dylan and Guthrie's son Arlo later claimed they learned much of Guthrie's performance style from Elliott. When asked about Arlo's claim, Elliott said, "I was flattered. Dylan learned from me the same way I learned from Woody. Woody didn't teach me. He just said, If you want to learn something, just steal it—that's the way I learned from Lead Belly."^{[citation needed][not in citation given][57]}

1950s and 1960s[link]

Deteriorating health[link]

By the late 1940s, Guthrie's health was declining, and his behavior was becoming extremely erratic. He received various diagnoses (including alcoholism and schizophrenia), but in 1952, it was finally determined that he was suffering from Huntington's disease, a genetic disorder inherited from his mother. Believing him to be a danger to their children, Marjorie suggested he return to California without her; they eventually divorced.^[58]

Upon his return to California, Guthrie lived at the Theatricum Botanicum, a summer-stock type theatre founded and owned by Will Geer; with blacklisted singers and actors, he waited out the anti-communist political climate. As his health worsened, he met and married his third wife, Anneke Van Kirk. They had a child, Lorinna Lynn. The couple moved to Fruit Cove, Florida, briefly. They lived in a bus on land called Beluthahatchee, owned by his friend Stetson Kennedy. Guthrie's arm was hurt in a campfire accident when gasoline used to start the campfire exploded. Although he regained movement in the arm, he was never able to play the guitar again. In 1954, the couple returned to New York.^[59] Shortly after, Anneke filed for divorce, a result of the strain of caring for Guthrie. Anneke left New York and allowed friends to adopt Lorinna Lynn. Lorinna had no further contact with her birth parents and died in 1973 at the age of nineteen in a car accident in California. After the divorce, Guthrie's second wife, Marjorie, re-entered his life and cared for him until his death.

Guthrie, increasingly unable to control his muscles, was hospitalized at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital from 1956 to 1961, at Brooklyn State Hospital until 1966,^[60] and finally at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center until his death.^[61] Marjorie and the children visited Guthrie at Greystone every Sunday. They answered fan mail and played on the hospital grounds. Eventually a longtime fan of Guthrie invited the family to his nearby home for the Sunday visits. This lasted until Guthrie was moved to the Brooklyn State Hospital, which was closer to where Marjorie lived.

When Bob Dylan, who idolized Guthrie and whose early folk career was deeply inspired by him, learned that Guthrie was hospitalized in Brooklyn, he was determined to meet his idol. By this time, Guthrie was said to have his "good days" and "bad days". On the good days, Dylan would sing songs to him, and at the beginning Guthrie seemed to warm to Dylan. When the bad days came, Guthrie would berate Dylan. Reportedly on Dylan's last visit, Guthrie didn't recognize him.

At the end of his life, Guthrie was largely alone except for family. Due to the progression of Huntington's, he was difficult to be around. Guthrie's illness was essentially untreated, due to a lack of information about the disease. His death helped raise awareness of the disease and led Marjorie to help found the Committee to Combat Huntington's Disease, which became the Huntington's Disease Society of America.^[62] None of Guthrie's three remaining children with Marjorie has developed symptoms of Huntington's. Two of Mary Guthrie's children (Gwendolyn and Sue) suffered from the disease. (Her son Bill died in an auto-train accident in Pomona, California, at age 23.)^[63] Both died at 41 years of age.^[64]

Folk revival and Guthrie's death[link]

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a new generation of young people were inspired by folk singers including Guthrie. These "folk revivalists" became more politically aware in their music than those of the previous generation. The American Folk Revival was beginning to take place, focused on the issues of the day, such as the civil rights movement and free speech movement. Pockets of folk singers were forming around the country in places such as Cambridge, Massachusetts and the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. One of Guthrie's visitors at Greystone Park was the 19-year-old Bob Dylan ^[65] who idolized Guthrie. Dylan wrote of Guthrie's repertoire: "The songs themselves were really beyond category. They had the infinite sweep of humanity in them."^[66] After learning of Guthrie's whereabouts, Dylan regularly visited him.^[67] Guthrie died of complications of Huntington's disease on October 3, 1967. By the time of his death, his work had been discovered by a new audience, introduced to them in part through Dylan, Pete Seeger, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, his ex-wife Marjorie and other new members of the folk revival, and his son Arlo.

Family[link]

• Married: Mary Esta Jennings (1933–1943), Marjorie Greenblatt Mazia (1945–1953), Anneke van Kirk (1953–1954)
• Children (8): Gwendolyn Gail (1935–1976), Sue (1937–1978), Bill (1939–1962), Cathy Ann (1943–1947), Arlo Davy (1947–), Joady Ben (1948–), Nora (1950–), Lorinna Lynn (1954–1973)

Musical legacy[link]

Foundation and archives[link]

The Woody Guthrie Foundation is a non-profit organization that serves as administrator and caretaker of the Woody Guthrie Archives. The archive houses the largest collection of Guthrie material in the world.^[69] Guthrie's unrecorded written lyrics housed at the Archives have been the starting point of several albums including the Wilco and Billy Bragg albums Mermaid Avenue and Mermaid Avenue Vol. II, created in 1998 sessions at the invitation of Guthrie's daughter Nora.^[70] The Native American (Diné) trio Blackfire also interpreted previously unreleased Guthrie lyrics at Nora's invitation.^[71] Jonatha Brooke's 2008 album, The Works includes lyrics from the Woody Guthrie Archives set to music by Jonatha Brooke.^[72] The various artists compilation Note of Hope: A Celebration of Woody Guthrie was released in 2011. Nora selected Jay Farrar, Will Johnson, Anders Parker, and Yim Yames to record her father's lyrics for New Multitudes to honor the 100th anniversary of his birth and a box set of the Mermaid Avenue sessions was also released.

Folk Festival[link]

The Woody Guthrie Folk Festival is held annually in mid-July to commemorate Guthrie's life and music. The festival is held on the weekend closest to Guthrie's birth date (July 14) in Guthrie's hometown of Okemah, Oklahoma. Planned and implemented annually by the Woody Guthrie Coalition, a non-profit corporation, the goal is simply to ensure Guthrie's musical legacy.^[73][74] The Woody Guthrie Coalition commissioned a local Creek Indian sculptor to cast a full-body bronze statue of Guthrie and his guitar, complete with the guitar's well-known inscription: "This machine kills fascists".^[75] The statue, sculpted by artist Dan Brook, stands along Okemah's main street in the heart of downtown and was unveiled in 1998, the inaugural year of the festival.^[76]

Jewish songs[link]

Marjorie Mazia was born Marjorie Greenblatt and her mother, Aliza Greenblatt, was a well-known Yiddish poet. With her, Guthrie wrote numerous Jewish lyrics. Guthrie’s Jewish lyrics can be traced to the unusual collaborative relationship he had with his mother-in-law, who lived across from Guthrie and his family in Brooklyn in the 1940s. Guthrie (the Oklahoma troubadour) and Greenblatt (the Jewish wordsmith) often discussed their artistic projects and critiqued each other’s works, finding common ground in their shared love of culture and social justice, despite very different backgrounds. Their collaboration flourished in 1940s Brooklyn, where Jewish culture was interwoven with music, modern dance, poetry and anti-fascist, pro-labor, classic socialist activism. Guthrie was inspired to write songs that came directly out of this unlikely relationship, both personal and political; he identified the problems of Jews with those of his fellow Okies and other oppressed peoples.

These lyrics were rediscovered by Nora Guthrie and were set to music by the Jewish Klezmer group The Klezmatics with the release of Happy Joyous Hanukkah on JMG Records in 2007. The Klezmatics also released Wonder Wheel — Lyrics by Woody Guthrie, an album of spiritual lyrics put to music composed by the band.^[77] The album, produced by Danny Blume, was awarded a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary World Music Album.^[78]

Tributes[link]

English anti-folk musician Billy Bragg is one of several artists influenced by Guthrie. He and rock band Wilco recorded two albums' worth of new music containing his previously unpublished lyrics.

Since his death, artists have paid tribute to Guthrie by covering his songs or by dedicating songs to him. One of the first artists to do so was Scottish folk artist Donovan, who covered Guthrie's "Car, Car (Riding in My Car)" on his 1965 debut album What's Bin Did and What's Bin Hid.^[79] On January 20, 1968, three months following Guthrie's death, Harold Leventhal produced A Tribute to Woody Guthrie at New York City's Carnegie Hall.^[80] Performers included Jack Elliott, Pete Seeger, Tom Paxton, Bob Dylan and The Band, Judy Collins, Arlo Guthrie, Richie Havens, Odetta, and others. Leventhal repeated the tribute on September 12, 1970 at the Hollywood Bowl. Recordings of both concerts were eventually released as LPs and later combined into one CD.^[81] The legendary Irish folk singer, Christy Moore, was also strongly influenced by Woody in his seminal 1970 album Prosperous, giving renditions of "The Ludlow Massacre" and Bob Dylan's "Song to Woody". Bob Dylan also penned, Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie as a later tribute song to Guthrie.^[82] Bruce Springsteen also performed a cover of Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" on his live album Live 1975–1985. In the introduction to the song, Springsteen referred to it as "just about one of the most beautiful songs ever written."^[83]

In September 1996 Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and Case Western Reserve University cohosted Hard Travelin': The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie, a 10-day conference of panel sessions, lectures, and concerts. The conference became the first in what would become the museum's annual American Music Masters Series conference.^[84] Highlights included Arlo Guthrie's keynote address, a Saturday night musical jamboree at Cleveland's Odeon Theater, and a Sunday night concert at Severance Hall, the home of the Cleveland Orchestra.^[85] Musicians performing over the course of the conference included Arlo Guthrie, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg, Pete Seeger, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, the Indigo Girls, Ellis Paul, Jimmy LaFave, Ani DiFranco, and others.^[86] In 1999, Wesleyan University Press published a collection of essays from the conference^[87] and DiFranco's record label, Righteous Babe, released a compilation of the Severance Hall concert, 'Til We Outnumber 'Em, in 2000.^[88]

From 1999 to 2002 the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service presented the traveling exhibit, This Land Is Your Land: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie. In collaboration with Nora Guthrie, the Smithsonian exhibition draws from rarely seen objects, illustrations, film footage, and recorded performances to reveal a complex man who was at once poet, musician, protester, idealist, itinerant hobo, and folk legend.^[89]

In 2003, Jimmy LaFave produced a Woody Guthrie tribute show called Ribbon of Highway, Endless Skyway. The ensemble show toured around the country and included a rotating cast of singer-songwriters individually performing Guthrie's songs. Interspersed between songs were Guthrie's philosophical writings read by a narrator. In addition to LaFave, members of the rotating cast included Ellis Paul, Slaid Cleaves, Eliza Gilkyson, Joel Rafael, husband-wife duo Sarah Lee Guthrie (Woody Guthrie's granddaughter) and Johnny Irion, Michael Fracasso, and The Burns Sisters. Oklahoma songwriter Bob Childers, sometimes called "the Dylan of the Dust", served as narrator.^[90][91] When word spread about the tour, performers began contacting LaFave, whose only prerequisite was to have an inspirational connection to Guthrie. Each artist chose the Guthrie songs that he or she would perform as part of the tribute. LaFave said, "It works because all the performers are Guthrie enthusiasts in some form".^{[citation needed][not in citation given][92]} The inaugural performance of the Ribbon of Highway tour took place on February 5, 2003 at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. The abbreviated show was a featured segment of Nashville Sings Woody, yet another tribute concert to commemorate the music of Woody Guthrie held during the Folk Alliance Conference. The cast of Nashville Sings Woody, a benefit for the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives, also included Arlo Guthrie, Marty Stuart, Nanci Griffith, Guy Clark, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Janis Ian, and others.^{[dead link][93]}

As a part of Guthrie's centennial celebrations, the New Multitudes performers played compositions including his lyrics at Webster Hall in New York City (from left to right: Anders Parker, Will Johnson [drumming], Jay Farrar, and Yim Yames)

Woody and Marjorie Guthrie were honored at a musical celebration featuring Billy Bragg and the band Brad on October 17, 2007 at Webster Hall in New York City. Steve Earle also performed. The event was hosted by actor/activist Tim Robbins to benefit the Huntington's Disease Society of America to commemorate the organization's 40th Anniversary.^[94]

Copyright controversy[link]

File:20040823 Jibjab Copyright Scans.pdf In his recordings in the early 1940s Woody Guthrie included the following “Copyright Warning”:

“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”^[95] Currently the copyright in much of Woody's songs is claimed by a number of different organizations.^[96]

When JibJab published a parody^[97] of Woody's song This Land Is Your Land to comment on the US 2004 Presidential election, Ludlow Music attempted to have this parody taken down, claiming it breached their copyright. JibJab then sued to affirm their parody was Fair Use, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) acting for them. As part of their research on the case they found that the song had actually been first published by Woody Guthrie in 1945, although the copyright was not registered until 1956. This meant that when Ludlow applied to renew the copyright in 1984 they were 11 years too late, and the song had in fact been in the public domain since 1973 (28 years from first publication).^[98] Ludlow agreed that JibJab were free to distribute their parody. In an interview on NPR Arlo Guthrie said that he thought the parody was hilarious and he thought Woody would have loved it too.^[99] Ludlow still claims copyright in this song; however, it is not clear what the basis of this claim is.^[100]

Posthumous honors[link]

Guthrie has continued to remain popular decades after his death; this mural was painted in his hometown of Okemah in 1994

Pete Seeger had the Sloop Woody Guthrie built for an organization he founded, the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater.^[101] It was launched in 1978. Now operated by the Beacon Sloop Club, it serves to educate people about sailing and the history and environs of the Hudson River.

Although Guthrie's catalog never brought him many awards while he was alive, in 1988 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the same year Bob Dylan was inducted (much of Dylan's initial folk music work was heavily influenced by Guthrie),^[102] and in 2000 he was honored with the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.^[103]

In 1987 "Roll On Columbia" was chosen as the official Washington State Folk Song,^[104] and in 2001 Guthrie's "Oklahoma Hills" was chosen to be the official state folk song of Oklahoma.^[14]

On September 26, 1992, The Peace Abbey, a multi-faith retreat center located in Sherborn, Massachusetts, awarded Guthrie their Courage of Conscience Award for his social activism and artistry in song which conveyed the plight of the common person.^[105]

On June 26, 1998, as part of its Legends of American Music series, the United States Postal Service issued 45 million 32-cent stamps honoring folk musicians Huddie Ledbetter, Guthrie, Sonny Terry and Josh White. The four musicians were represented on sheets of 20 stamps.^[106]

In July 2001, CB's Gallery in New York City began hosting an annual Woody Guthrie Birthday Bash concert featuring multiple performers. This event moved to the Bowery Poetry Club in 2007 after CB's Gallery and CBGB, its parent club, closed.^[107]

In 2005, the Boston-based punk band Dropkick Murphys recorded "I'm Shipping Up to Boston". The song's lyrics are from a poem written by Guthrie,^[108] and the music was composed by the band. The song was released in 2005 on the album The Warrior's Code and gained fame when it was used as part of the soundtrack for the 2006 movie The Departed.

In 2006, The Klezmatics set Jewish lyrics written by Guthrie to music. The resulting album, Wonder Wheel, won the Grammy award for best contemporary world music album.^[109]

On April 27, 2007, Guthrie was one of four Okemah natives inducted into Okemah's Hall of Fame during the town's Pioneer Day weekend of festivities.^[110]

On February 10, 2008, The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949, a rare live recording released in cooperation with the Woody Guthrie Foundation,^[111] was the recipient of a Grammy Award in the category Best Historical Album.^[112] Less than two years later, Guthrie was again nominated for a Grammy in the same category with the 2009 release of My Dusty Road on Rounder Records.^[113]

In the centennial year of Guthrie's birthday another album of newly composed songs on his lyrics has been released: New Multitudes. At 10 March 2012 there was a tribute concert at the Brady Theater in Tulsa, Oklahoma. John Mellencamp, Arlo Guthrie, the Del McCoury Band and the Flaming Lips have performed.^[114]

The Grammy Museum is going to have a tribute week in April 2012 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame plans some in June. The four-disc box "Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions" by Billy Bragg and Wilco is set for an April release. Inside there will be 17 unreleased songs and a documentary.^[114]

Selected discography[link]

Many Guthrie tracks have been repeatedly repackaged and reordered. Items here are listed in order of the most recent published date, not original recording date.^[115]

See also[link]

• Arlo Guthrie
• List of songs by Woody Guthrie
• List of albums by Woody Guthrie
• Lynching of Laura and Lawrence Nelson
• Pete Seeger

References[link]

Citations[link]

Printed sources[link]

• Cray, Ed (2004). Ramblin Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-32736-1. 
• Longhi, Jim (1997). Woody, Cisco and Me. Random House. ISBN 0-252-02276-9. 
• Klein, Joe (1980). Woody Guthrie: A Life. Random House. ISBN 0-385-33385-4. 
• Santelli, Robert (1999). Hard Travelin: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie. Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 0-8195-6391-9. 

Further reading/listening[link]

• Hogeland, William (March 14, 2004), Emulating the Real and Vital Guthrie, Not St. Woody, New York Times.
• Down Home Radio Show. LeadBelly & Woody Guthrie live on WNYC Radio, Dec. 1940. Audio re-broadcast of a 1940 radio show. Retrieved on January 29, 2008.
• Earle, Steve. Woody Guthrie. The Nation, July 21, 2003. Retrieved on January 29, 2008.
• Electronic Frontier Foundation. Scanned images of some of Woody Guthrie's original works. Retrieved on January 29, 2008.
• Jackson, Mark Allen. Prophet Singer: The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie. University Press of Mississippi, January, 2007. ISBN 978-1-60473-102-6
• La Chapelle, Peter. Is Country Music Inherently Conservative? History News Network. Nov. 12, 2007. Retrieved on January 29, 2008.
• Kaufman, Will (2011). Woody Guthrie, American Radical University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-03602-6
• La Chapelle, Peter. Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California. University of California Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-520-24888-5 (hb); ISBN 978-0-520-24889-2 (pb)
• Library of Congress. Timeline of Woody Guthrie (1912–1967). Retrieved on January 29, 2008.
• Library of Congress. Woody Guthrie and the Archive of American Folk Song: Correspondence, 1940–1950. Retrieved on January 29, 2008.
• Marroquin, Danny. Walking the Long Road. PopMatters.com. Aug. 4, 2006. Retrieved on January 29, 2008.
• Public Broadcasting Service. Woody Guthrie: Ain't Got No Home. Documentary from PBS' American Masters series, July 2006. Retrieved on January 29, 2008.
• University of Oregon. Roll On Columbia: Woody Guthrie and the Bonneville Power Administration. Video documentary. Retrieved on January 29, 2008.
• University of Virginia. Guthrie singing "This Land Is Your Land". MP3 recording. Retrieved on January 29, 2008.
• Symphony Silicon Valley Concert Recordings. David Amram's Symphonic Variations on a Song by Woody Guthrie Recorded September 30, 2007. Audio recording. Retrieved on January 11, 2008.
• WoodyGuthrie.de. Woody Guthrie Related Audio. Miscellaneous Real Audio files featuring Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Alan Lomax and others. Retrieved on January 29, 2008.

External links[link]

Find more about Woody Guthrie on Wikipedia's sister projects:
	Images and media from Commons
	Quotations from Wikiquote
	Source texts from Wikisource

• Woody Guthrie at the Open Directory Project
• The Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives
• Woody Guthrie and the Archive of American Folk Song: Correspondence, 1940–1950, Library of Congress, American Folklife Center. American Memory presentation of archival correspondence written by Woody Guthrie to the staff of the Archive of American Folk Song. Retrieved August 31, 2009
• Woody Guthrie in NYC, 1943 – slideshow by Life magazine
• Woody Guthrie's Discography on Smithsonian Folkways
• Songfacts interview with Anna Canoni (Guthrie's granddaughter)
• Works by or about Woody Guthrie in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture – Guthrie, Woody
• Woody Guthrie at Find a Grave
• Woody Guthrie discography at Discogs
• Voices of Oklahoma interview with Nora Guthrie. First person interview conducted with Nora Guthrie speaking about her father, Woody Guthrie, on October 7, 2010. Original audio and transcript archived with Voices of Oklahoma oral history project.
• The short film "The Fight for Life (1940)" is available for free download at the Internet Archive [more]
• The short film "The Columbia (1949)" is available for free download at the Internet Archive [more]

Irving Lerner (7 March 1909, New York City - 25 December 1976, Los Angeles) was an American filmmaker.

Before becoming a filmmaker, Lerner was a research editor for Columbia University's Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, getting his start in film by making documentaries for the anthropology department. In the early 1930s, he was a member of the Workers Film and Photo League, and later, Frontier Films. He made films for the Rockefeller Foundation and other academic institutions, becoming a film editor and second-unit director involved with the emerging American documentary movement of the late 1930s. Lerner produced two documentaries for the Office of War Information during WW II and after the war became the head of New York University's Educational Film Institute. In 1948, Lerner and Joseph Strick shared directorial chores on a short documentary, Muscle Beach. Lerner then turned to low-budget, quickly filmed features. When not hastily making his own thrillers, Lerner worked as a technical advisor, a second-unit director, a co-editor and an editor.

Lerner was cinematographer, director, or assistant director on documentary films such as One Third of a Nation (1939), Valley Town (1940), The Land (1942) directed by Robert Flaherty, and Suicide Attack (1950). Lerner was also producer of the OWI documentary Hymn of the Nations (1944), directed by Alexander Hammid, and featuring Arturo Toscanini, and co-director with Joseph Strick of the short documentary Muscle Beach (1948).

Irving Lerner was also a director and film editor with directing credits such as Studs Lonigan (1960) and editing credits such as Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960) and Martin Scorsese's New York, New York (1977). Lerner died during the cutting of New York, New York, and the film was dedicated to him.

Filmography[link]

As Director

• A Town Called Hell (1971) (uncredited)
• The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1969)
• Ben Casey (TV series, 13 episodes, 1961–1965)
• Seaway (1965) (TV series, unknown episodes)
• Mr. Novak (TV series, 1 episode, 1963)
• Cry of Battle (1963)
• Target: The Corruptors (1 episode, 1961)
• King of Diamonds (1 episode, 1961)
• Studs Lonigan (1960)
• City of Fear (1959)
• Murder by Contract (1958)
• Edge of Fury (1958)
• Man Crazy (1953)
• Suicide Attack (1951)
• Muscle Beach (1948)
• To Hear Your Banjo Play (1947)
• Swedes in America (1943) with Ingrid Bergman

As Producer

• Hay que matar a B. (1975) (co-producer)
• The Darwin Adventure (1972) (co-producer)
• Bad Man's River (1971) (executive producer)
• Captain Apache (1971) (associate producer)
• Custer of the West (1967) (executive producer)
• The Wild Party (1956) (supervising producer)
• C-Man (1949) (producer)
• To Hear Your Banjo Play (1947) (co-producer)
• Hymn of the Nations (1944) (producer) (uncredited)

As Editor

• Mustang: The House That Joe Built (1978)
• The River Niger (1976)
• Steppenwolf (1974)
• Spartacus (1960) (uncredited)^[1]
• The Marines Come Through (1938)
• China Strikes Back (1937) (unconfirmed)

As Second Unit Director or Assistant Director

• A Town Called Hell (1971) (second unit director)
• Custer of the West (1967) (second unit director: Civil War sequense)
• Spartacus (second unit director) (uncredited)
• Valley Town (1940) (second unit director)
• One Third of a Nation (1939) (second unit director) (uncredited)

As Actor

• Hay que matar a B. (1975)
• On Camera (1 episode, 1955)
• Pie in the Sky (1935)

As Miscellaneous Crew

• The Savage Eye (1960) (technical advisor)
• God's Little Acre (1958) (associate to director)
• Robot Monster (1953) (production associate)

Editing Department

• New York, New York (1977) (supervising editor)
• Executive Action (1973) (associate editor)

Production Manager

• Men in War (1957) (production supervisor)

As Cinematographer

• The Land (1942)

Dedicatee

• New York, New York (1977) (our gratitude and respect to)

Alleged Soviet Espionage[link]

Irving Lerner was an American citizen and an employee of the United States Office of War Information during World War II who worked in the Motion Picture Division. Lerner was allegedly involved in espionage on behalf of Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU); Arthur Adams, a trained engineer and experienced spy who moved to the Soviet Union in 1946, was Lerner's key contact.^[2]

In the winter of 1944, a counterintelligence officer caught Lerner attempting to photograph the cyclotron at the University of California, Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, which was part of the Manhattan Project. The cyclotron had been used in the creation of plutonium and Lerner was acting without authorization. Lerner resigned and went to work for Keynote Recordings,^[3] owned by Eric Bernay, another Soviet intelligence contact. Arthur Adams, who ran Irving as an agent, also worked at Keynote.

See Also[link]

• Atomic spies
• US Office of War Information (OWI)

References[link]

• Frontier Films: Members [1]
• FBI memo, “Soviet Activities in the United States,” 25 July 1946, Papers of Clark Clifford, Harry S. Truman Library
• John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Yale University Press, 1999), pg. 325

External links[link]

• Suicide Attack - documentary review
• Irving Lerner at IMDB

Edward Henry Weston (March 24, 1886 – January 1, 1958) was a 20th century American photographer. He has been called "one of the most innovative and influential American photographers…"^[1] and "one of the masters of 20th century photography."^[2] Over the course of his forty-year career Weston photographed an increasingly expansive set of subjects, including landscapes, still lifes, nudes, portraits, genre scenes and even whimsical parodies. It is said that he developed a "quintessentially American, and specially Californian, approach to modern photography"^[3] because of his focus on the people and places of the American West. In 1937 Weston was the first photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, and over the next two years he produced nearly 1,400 negatives using his 8 × 10 view camera. Some of his most famous photographs were taken of the trees and rocks at Point Lobos, California, near where he lived for many years.

Weston was born in Chicago and moved to California when he was 21. He knew he wanted to be a photographer from an early age, and initially his work was typical of the soft focus pictorialism that was popular at the time. Within a few years, however, he abandoned that style and went on to be one of the foremost champions of highly detailed photographic images.

In 1947 he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and he stopped photographing soon thereafter. He spent the remaining ten years of his life overseeing the printing of more than 1,000 of his most famous images.

Life and work[link]

1886–1906: Early life[link]

Weston was born in Highland Park, Illinois, the second child and only son of Edward Burbank Weston, an obstetrician, and Alice Jeanette Brett, a Shakespearean actress. His mother died when he was five and he was raised mainly by his sister Mary, whom he called "May" or "Mazie". She was nine years older than he, and they developed a very close bond that was one of the few steady relationships in Weston's life.^[4]

His father remarried when he was nine, but neither Weston nor his sister got along with their new stepmother and stepbrother. After May was married and left their home in 1897, Weston's father devoted most of his time to his new wife and her son. Weston was left on his own much of the time; he stopped going to school and withdrew into his own room in their large home.^[4]

As a present for his 16th birthday Weston's father gave him his first camera, a Kodak Bull's-Eye #2, which was a simple box camera. He took it on vacation in the Midwest, and by the time he returned home his interest in photography was enough to lead him to purchase a used 5 × 7 inch view camera. He began photographing in Chicago parks and a farm owned by his aunt, and developed his own film and prints. Later he would remember that even at that early age his work showed strong artistic merit. He said, "I feel that my earliest work of 1903 ‒ though immature ‒ is related more closely, both with technique and composition, to my latest work than are several of my photographs dating from 1913-1920, a period in which I was trying to be artistic."^[5]

In 1904 May and her family moved to California, leaving Weston further isolated in Chicago. He earned a living by taking a job at a local department store, but he continued to spend most of his free time taking photos, Within two years he felt confident enough of his photography that he submitted his work to the magazine Camera and Darkroom, and in the April, 1906, issue they published a full-page reproduction of his picture Spring, Chicago. This is the first known publication of any of his photographs.

1906–23: Becoming a photographer[link]

Edward Weston, taken by Fred Archer in approximately 1915

At the urging of his sister, Weston left Chicago in the spring of 1906 and moved near May's home in Tropico, California (now a neighborhood in Glendale). He decided to stay there and pursue a career in photography, but he soon realized he needed more professional training. A year later he moved to Effingham, Illinois, in order to enroll in the Illinois School of Photography. They taught a nine-month course, but Weston finished all of the class work in six months. The school refused to give him a diploma unless he paid for the full nine months; Weston refused and instead moved back to California in the spring of 1908.

He briefly worked at the photography studio of George Steckel in Los Angeles, as a negative retoucher. Within a few months he moved to the more established studio of Louis Mojonier. For the next several years he learned the techniques and business of operating a photography studio under Mojonier's direction.

Sometime in the summer of 1908 Weston was introduced to his sister's best friend, Flora May Chandler. She was a grade-school teacher, seven years older than Weston and second cousin to Harry Chandler, who at that time was described as the head of "the single most powerful family in Southern California.".^[6] Chandler had inherited some money when her father died, and although she was not as wealthy as her cousins, Weston recognized that she had enough money to allow him to start working full-time as a photographer.^[7]

On January 30, 1909, Weston and Chandler married in a simple ceremony. The first of their four sons, Edward Chandler Weston (1910–1993), known as Chandler, was born on April 26, 1910. Named after Weston and his wife, he later became a portrait photographer and sometimes assistant to his father.

In 1911 Weston opened his own business, called "The Little Studio", in Tropico. His sister later asked him why he opened his studio in Tropico rather than in the nearby metropolis of Los Angeles, and he replied "Sis, I'm going to make my name so famous that it won’t matter where I live."^[8]

For the next three years he worked alone in his studio, making portraits of children and friends. Even at that early stage of his career he was highly particular about his work; in an interview at that time he said "[photographic] plates are nothing to me unless I get what I want. I have used thirty of them at a sitting if I did not secure the effect to suit me."^[9]

His critical eye paid off as he quickly gained more recognition for his work. He won prizes in national competitions, published several more photographs and wrote articles for magazines such as Photo-Era and American Photography, championing the pictorial style.

On December 16, 1911, Weston's second son, Theodore Brett Weston (1911–1993), was born. He became a long-time artistic collaborator with his father and an important photographer on his own.

"Margrethe Mather and Edward Weston" (1922) by Imogen Cunningham

Sometime in the fall of 1913 Los Angeles photographer Margrethe Mather visited Weston's studio because of his growing reputation, and within a few months they developed an intense relationship.^[10] Weston was a quiet Midwestern transplant to California, and Mather was a part of the growing bohemian cultural scene in Los Angeles. She was very outgoing and artistic in a flamboyant way, and her permissive sexual morals were far different from the conservative Weston at the time - Mather had been a prostitute and was bisexual with a preference for women.^[11] Mather presented a stark contrast to Weston's home life; his wife Flora was described as a "homely, rigid Puritan, and an utterly conventional woman, with whom he had little in common since he abhorred conventions"^[12] ‒ and he found Mather's uninhibited lifestyle irresistible and her photographic vision intriguing.

He asked Mather to be his studio assistant, and for the next decade they worked closely together, making individual and jointly signed portraits of such luminaries as Carl Sandburg and Max Eastman. A joint exhibition of their work in 2001 revealed that during this period Weston emulated Mather's style and, later, her choice of subjects. On her own Mather photographed "fans, hands, eggs, melons, waves, bathroom fixtures, seashells and birds wings, all subjects that Weston would also explore."^[13] A decade later he described her as "the first important person in my life, and perhaps even now, though personal contact has gone, the most important."^[14]

In early 1915 Weston began keeping detailed journals he later came to call his "Daybooks". For the next two decades he recorded his thoughts about his work, observations about photography, and his interactions with friends, lovers and family. On December 6, 1916, a third son, Lawrence Neil Weston, was born. He also followed in the footsteps of his father and became a well-known photographer. It was during this period that Weston first met photographer Johan Hagemeyer, whom Weston mentored and lent his studio to from time to time. Later, Hagemeyer would return the favor by letting Weston use his studio in Carmel after he returned from Mexico. For the next several years Weston continued to earn a living by taking portraits in his small studio which he called "the shack".^[9]

Meanwhile, Flora was spending all of her time caring for their children. Their fourth son, Cole Weston (1919–2003), was born on January 30, 1919, and afterward she rarely had time to leave their home.

Over the summer of 1920 Weston met two people who were part of the growing Los Angeles cultural scene: Roubaix de l'Abrie Richey, known as "Robo" and a woman he called his wife, Tina Modotti. Modotti, who was then known only as a stage and film actress, was never married to Robo, but they pretended to be for the sake of his family. Weston and Modotti were immediately attracted to each other, and they soon became lovers.^[15] Richey knew of Modotti's affair, but he continued to be friends with Weston and later invited him to come to Mexico and share his studio.^[16]

The following year Weston agreed to allow Mather to become an equal partner in his studio. For several months they took portraits that they signed with both of their names. This was only time in his long career that Weston shared credit with another photographer.

Sometime in 1920 he began photographing nude models for the first time. His first models were his wife Flora and their children, but soon thereafter he took at least three nude studies of Mather. He followed these with several more photographs of nude models, the first of dozens of figure studies he would make of friends and lovers over the next twenty years.

Until now Weston had kept his relationships with other women a secret from his wife, but as he began to photograph more nudes Flora became suspicious about what went on with his models. Chandler recalled that his mother regularly sent him on "errands" to his father's studio and asked him to tell her who was there and what they were doing.^[17]

One of the first who agreed to model nude for Weston was Modotti. She became his primary model for the next several years.

In 1922 he visited his sister May, who had moved to Middletown, Ohio. While there he made five or six photographs of the tall smoke stacks at the nearby Armco steel mill. These images signaled a change in Weston's photographic style, a transition from the soft-focus pictorialism of the past to a new, cleaner-edge style. He immediately recognized the change and later recorded it in his notes: "The Middletown visit was something to remember…most of all in importance was my photographing of 'Armco'…That day I made great photographs, even Stieglitz thought they were important!"^[18]

At that time New York City was the cultural center for photography as an art form in America, and Alfred Stieglitz was the most influential figure in photography.^[19] Weston badly wanted to go to New York to meet with him, but he did not have enough money to make the trip. His brother-in-law gave him enough money to continue on from Middletown to New York City, and he spent most of October and early November there. While there he met artist Charles Sheeler, photographers Clarence H. White, Gertrude Kasebier and finally, Stieglitz. Weston wrote that Stieglitz told him, "Your work and attitude reassures me. You have shown me at least several prints which have given me a great deal of joy. And I can seldom say that of photographs."^[20]

Soon after Weston returned from New York, Robo moved to Mexico and set up a studio there to create batiks. Within a short while he had arranged for a joint exhibition of his work and of photographs by Weston, Mather and a few others. In early 1923 Modotti left by train to be with Robo in Mexico, but he contracted smallpox and died shortly before she arrived. Modotti was grief stricken, but within a few weeks she felt well enough that she decided to stay and carry out the exhibition that Robo had planned. The show was a success, and, due in no small part to his nude studies of Modotti, it firmly established Weston's artistic reputation in Mexico.^[21]

After the show closed Modotti returned to California, and Weston and she made plans to return to Mexico together. He wanted to spend a couple of months there photographing and promoting his work, and, conveniently, he could travel under the pretense of Modotti being his assistant and translator.^[22]

The week before he left for Mexico, Weston briefly reunited with Mather and took several nudes of her lying in the sand at Redondo Beach. These images were very different from his previous nude studies - sharply focused and showing her entire body in relation to the natural setting. They have been called the artistic prototypes for his most famous nudes, those of Charis Wilson which he would take more than a decade later.^[23]

1923–27: Mexico[link]

On July 30, 1923, Weston, his son Chandler, and Modotti left on a steamer for the extended trip to Mexico. His wife, Flora, and their other three sons waved goodbye to them at the dock. It's unknown what Flora understood or thought about the relationship between Weston and Modotti, but she is reported to have called out at the dock, "Tina, take good care of my boys."^[24]

They arrived in Mexico City on August 11 and rented a large hacienda outside of the city.. Within a month he had arranged for an exhibition of his work at the Aztec Land Gallery, and on October 17 the show opened to glowing press reviews. He was particularly proud of a review by Marius de Zayas that said "Photography is beginning to be photography, for until now it has only been art."^[25]

The different culture and scenery in Mexico forced Weston to look at things in new ways. He became more responsive to what was in front of him, and he turned his camera on everyday objects like toys, doorways and bathroom fixtures. He also made several intimate nudes and portraits of Modotti. He wrote in his Daybooks:

• The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself…I feel definite in the belief that the approach to photography is through realism.^[26]

Weston continued to photograph the people and things around him, and his reputation in Mexico increased the longer he stayed. He had a second exhibition at the Aztec Land Galley in 1924, and he had a steady stream of local socialites asking him to take their portraits. At the same time, Weston began to miss his other sons back in the U.S. As with many of his actions, though, it was a woman who motivated him most. He had recently corresponded with a woman he had known for several years named Miriam Lerner, and as her letters became more passionate he longed to see her again.^[27]

He and Chandler returned to San Francisco at the end of 1924, and the next month he set up a studio with Hagemeyer. Weston seemed to be struggling with his past and his future during this period. He burned all of his pre-Mexico journals, as though trying to erase the past, and started a new series of nudes with Lerner and with his son Neil. He wrote that these images were "the start of a new period in my approach and attitude towards photography."^[27]

His new relationship with Lerner did not last long, and in August 1925 he returned to Mexico, this time with his son Brett. Modotti had arranged a joint show of their photographs, and it opened the week he returned. He received new critical acclaim, and six of his prints were purchased for the State Museum. For the next several months he concentrated once again on photographing folk art, toys and local scenes. One of his strongest images of this period is of three black clay pots that art historian Rene d'Harnoncourt described as "the beginning of a new art."^[28]

In May 1926 Weston signed a contract with writer Anita Brenner for $1,000 to make photographs for a book she was writing about Mexican folk art. In June he, Modotti and Brett started traveling around the country in search of lesser known native arts and crafts. His contract required him to give Brenner three finished prints from 400 8x10 negatives, and it took him until November of that year to complete the work.^[29] During their travels, Brett received a crash course in photography from his father, and he made more than two dozen prints that his father judged to be of exceptional quality.

By the time they returned from their trip, Weston and Modotti's relationship had crumbled, and within less than two weeks he and Brett returned to California. He never traveled to Mexico again.

1927–35: Glendale to Carmel[link]

Weston initially returned to his old studio in Glendale (previously called Tropico). He quickly arranged a dual exhibition at University of California of the photographs that he and Brett had made the year before. The father showed one hundred prints and the son showed twenty. Brett was only 15 years old at the time.

In February he started a new series of nudes, this time of dancer Bertha Wardell. One of this series, of her kneeling body cut off at the shoulders, is one of Weston's most well-known figure studies. At this same time he met Canadian painter Henrietta Shore, whom he asked to comment on the photos of Wardell. He was surprised by her honest critique: "I wish you would not do so many nudes - you are getting used to them, the subject no longer amazes you ‒ most of these are just nudes."^[30]

He asked to look at her work and was intrigued by her large paintings of sea shells. He borrowed several shells from her, thinking he might find some inspiration for a new still life series. Over the next few weeks he explored many different kinds of shell and background combinations - in his log of photographs taken for 1927 he listed fourteen negatives of shells.^[31] One of these, simply called Nautilus, 1927" (sometimes called Shell, 1927), became one of his most famous images. Modotti called the image "mystical and erotic,"^[32] and when she showed it to Rene d'Harnoncourt he said he felt "weak at the knees."^[33] Weston is known to have made at least twenty-eight prints of this image, more than he had made of any other shell image.^[31]

In September of that year Weston had a major exhibition at Palace of the Legion of Honor. At the open of the show he met fellow photographer Willard Van Dyke, who later introduced Weston to Ansel Adams.

In May, 1928, Weston and Brett made a brief but important trip to the Mojave Desert. It was there that he first explored and photographed landscapes as an art form.^[34] He found the stark rock forms and empty spaces to be a visual revelation, and over a long weekend he took twenty-seven photographs.^[35] In his journal he declared "these negatives are the most important I have ever done."^[36]

Later that year he and Brett moved to San Francisco, where they lived and worked in a small studio owned by Hagemeyer. He made portraits to earn an income, but he longed to get away by himself and get back to his art. In early 1929 he moved to Hagemeyer's cottage in Carmel, and it was there that he finally found the solitude and the inspiration that he was seeking. He placed a sign in studio window that said, "Edward Weston, Photographer, Unretouched Portraits, Prints for Collectors."

He started making regular trips to nearby Point Lobos, where he would continue to photograph until the end of his career. It was there that he learned to fine-tune his photographic vision to match the visual space of his view camera, and the images he took there, of kelp, rocks and wind-blown trees, are among his finest. Looking at his work from this period, one biographer wrote:

• "Weston arranged his compositions so that things happened on the edges; lines almost cross or meet and circular lines just touch the edges tangentially; his compositions were now created exclusively for a space with the proportions of eight by ten. There is no extraneous space nor is there too little."^[37]

In early April, 1929, Weston met photographer Sonya Noskowiak at a party, and by the end of the month she was living with him. As with many of his other relationships, she became his model, muse, pupil and assistant. They would continue to live together for five years.

Intrigued by the many kinds and shapes of kelp he found on the beaches near Carmel, in 1930 Weston began taking close-ups of vegetables and fruits. He made a variety of photographs of cabbage, kale, onions, bananas, and finally, his most iconic image, peppers. In August of that year Noskowiak brought him several green peppers, and over a four-day period he shot at least thirty different negatives. Of these, Pepper No. 30, is among the all-time masterpieces of photography.^[38]

Weston had a series of important one-man exhibitions in 1930-31. The first was at Alma Reed's Delphic Studio Galley in New York, followed closely by a mounting of the same show at the Denny Watrous Gallery in Carmel. Both received rave reviews, including a two-page article in the New York Times Magazine.^[37] These were followed by shows at De Young Museum in San Francisco and the Galerie Jean Naert in Paris.

Although he was succeeding professionally his personal life was very complex. For most of their marriage, Flora was able to take care of their children because of an inheritance from her parents. However, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 had wiped out most of her savings, and Weston felt increased pressure to help provide more for her and his sons. He described this time as "the most trying economic period of my life."^[37]

In 1932, The Art of Edward Weston, the first book devoted exclusively to Weston's work, was published. It was edited by Merle Armitage and dedicated to Alice Rohrer, an admirer and patron of Weston whose $500 donation helped pay for the book to be published.

During the same time a small group of like-minded photographers in the San Francisco area, led by Van Dyke and Ansel Adams, began informally meeting to discuss their common interest and aesthetics. Inspired by Weston's show at the De Young Museum the previous year, they approached the museum with the idea of mounting a group exhibition of their work. They named themselves Group f/64, and in November, 1932, an exhibition of 80 of their prints opened at the museum. The show was a critical success.

In 1933 Weston bought a 4 × 5 Graflex camera, which was much smaller and lighter than the large view camera he had used for many years. He began taking close-up nudes of Noskowiak and other models. The smaller camera allowed him to interact more with his models, while at the same time the nudes he took during this period began to resemble some of the contorted root and vegetables he had taken the year before.^[39]

In early 1934, "a new and important chapter opened"^[40] in Weston's life when he met Charis Wilson at a concert. Even more than with his previous lovers, Weston was immediately captivated by her beauty and her personality. He wrote: "A new love came into my life, a most beautiful one, one which will, I believe, stand the test of time."^[41] On April 22 he photographed her nude for the first time, and they entered into an intense relationship. He was still living with Noskowiak at that time, but within two weeks he asked her to move out, declaring that for him other women were "as inevitable as the tides".^[42]

Perhaps because of the intensity of his new relationship, he stopped writing in his Daybooks at this same time. Six months later he wrote one final entry, looking back from April 22:

• After eight months we are closer together than ever. Perhaps C. will be remembered as the great love of my life. Already I have achieved certain heights reached with no other love.^[43]

1935–45: Guggenheim grant to Wildcat Hill[link]

In January, 1935 Weston was facing increasing financial difficulties. He closed his studio in Carmel and moved to Santa Monica Canyon, California, where he opened a new studio with Brett. He implored Wilson to come and live with him, and in August 1935 she finally agreed. While she had an intense interest in his work, Wilson was the first woman Weston had lived with since Flora who had no interest in becoming a photographer.^[44] This allowed Weston to concentrate on her as his muse and model, and in turn Wilson devoted her time to promoting Weston's art as his assistant and quasi-agent.

Almost immediately he began taking a new series of nudes with Wilson as the model. One of the first photographs he took of her, on the balcony of their home, became one of his most published images (Nude (Charis, Santa Monica)). Soon after they took the first of several trips to Oceano Dunes, not far from Santa Monica. It was there that Weston made some of his most daring and intimate photographs of any of his models, capturing Wilson in completely uninhibited poses in the sand dunes. He exhibited only one or two of this series in his lifetime, thinking several of the others were "too erotic"^[45] for the general public.

Although his recent work had received critical acclaim, he was not earning enough income from his artistic images to provide a steady income. Rather than going back to relying solely on portraiture, he started the “Edward Weston Print of the Month Club”, offering selections of his photos for a monthly $5 subscription. Each month subscribers would receive a new print from Weston, with a limited edition of 40 copies of each print. Although he created these prints with the same high standards that he did for his exhibition prints, it is thought that he never had more than eleven subscribers.^[44]

At the suggestion of Beaumont Newhall, Weston decided to apply for a Guggenheim Foundation grant (now known as a Guggenheim Fellowship). He wrote a two-sentence description about his work, assembled thirty-five of his favorites prints, and sent it in.^[46] Afterward Dorothea Lange and her husband suggested that the application was too brief to be seriously considered, and Weston resubmitted it with a four-page letter and work plan. He did not mention that Wilson had written the new application for him.^[47]

On March 22, 1937, Weston received notification that he had been awarded a Guggenheim grant, the first ever given to a photographer.^[48] The award was $2,000 for one year, a significant amount of money at that time. He was able to further capitalize on the award by arranging to provide the editor of AAA Westway Magazine with 8-10 photos per month for $50 during their travels, with Wilson getting an additional $15 monthly for photo captions and short narratives. They purchased a new car and set out on Weston's dream trip to go and photograph whatever he wanted. Over the next twelve months they made seventeen trips and covered 16,697 miles according to Wilson's detailed log. Weston made 1,260 negatives during the trip.

The freedom of this trip with the "love of his life", combined with all of his sons now reaching the age of adulthood, gave Weston the motivation to finally divorce his wife. They had been living apart for sixteen years.^[49]

Due to the success of the past year, Weston applied for and received a second year of Guggenheim support. Although he wanted to do some additional traveling, he intended to use most of the money to allow him to print his past year's work. He commissioned Neil to build a small home in the Carmel Highlands on property owned by Wilson's father. They named the place "Wildcat Hill" because of the many domestic cats that soon occupied the grounds.

Wilson set up a writing studio in what was intended to be a small garage behind the house, and she spent several months writing and editing stories from their travels.

In 1939, Seeing California with Edward Weston was published, with photographs by Weston and writing by Wilson. Finally relieved from the financial stresses of the past and inordinately happy with his work and his relationship, Weston married Wilson in a small ceremony on April 24.

Buoyed by the success of their first book, in 1940 they published California and the West. The first edition, featuring 96 of Weston's photos with text by Wilson, sold for $3.95. Over the summer, Weston taught photography at the first Ansel Adams Workshop at Yosemite National Park.

Just as the Guggenheim money was running out, Weston was invited to illustrate a new edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. He would receive $1,000 for photographs and $500 travel expenses. Weston insisted on having artistic control of the images he would take and insisted that he would not be taking literal illustrations of Whitman's text. On May 28 he and Wilson began a trip that would cover 20,000 miles through 24 states; he took between 700 and 800 8x10 negatives as well as dozens of Graflex portraits.^[50]

On December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor was attacked, and the United States entered World War II. Weston was near the end of the Whitman trip, and he was deeply affected by the outbreak of the war. He wrote: "When the war broke out we scurried home. Charis did not want to scurry. I did."^[51]

He spent the first few months of 1942 organizing and printing the negatives from the Whitman trip. Of the hundred of images he took, forty-nine were selected for publication.

Due to the war, Point Lobos was closed to the public for several years. Weston continued to work on images centered on Wildcat Hill, including shots of the many cats that lived there. Weston treated them with the same serious intent that he applied to all of his other subjects, and Charis assembled the results into their most unusual publication, The Cats of Wildcat Hill, which was finally published in 1947.

The year 1945 marked the beginning of significant changes for Weston. He began to experience the first symptoms of Parkinson's disease, a debilitating ailment that gradually stole his strength and his ability to photograph. He withdrew from Wilson, who at the same time began to become more involved in local politics and the Carmel cultural scene. A strength that originally brought them together - her lack of interest in becoming a photographer herself - eventually led to their break-up. She wrote, "My flight from Edward was also partly an escape from photography, which had taken up so much room in my life for so many years."^[52]

While working on a major retrospective exhibition for the Museum of Modern Art, he and Wilson separated. Weston returned to Glendale since the land for their cabin at Wildcat Hill still belonged to Wilson's father. Within a few months she moved out and arranged to sell the property to him.

1946–58: Final years[link]

In February, 1946, Weston's major retrospective opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He and Beaumont Newhall selected 313 prints for the exhibition, and eventually 250 photographs were displayed along with 11 negatives. At that time many of his prints were still for sale, and he sold 97 prints from the exhibit at $25 per print. Later that year, Weston was asked by Dr. George L. Waters of Kodak to produce 8 × 10 Kodachrome transparencies for their advertising campaign. Weston had never worked in color before, primarily because he had no means of developing or printing the more complicated color process. He accepted their offer in no small part because they offered him $250 per image, the highest amount he would be paid for any single work in his lifetime.^[53] He eventually sold seven color works to Kodak of landscapes and scenery at Point Lobos and nearby Monterey harbor.

By late 1948 he was no longer physically able to use his large view camera. That year he took his last photographs, at Point Lobos. His final negative was an image he called, "Rocks and Pebbles, 1948". Although diminished in his capacity, Weston never stopped being a photographer. He worked with his sons and others to catalog his images and especially to oversee the publication and printing of his work. In 1950 there was a major retrospective of his work at the Musee National d'Art Moderne in Paris, and in 1952 he published a Fiftieth Anniversary portfolio, with images printed by Brett.

During this time he worked with Cole, Brett, and Brett's wife Dody Warren to select and have them print a master set of what he considered his best work. They spent many long hours together in the darkroom, and by 1956 they had produced what Weston called “The Project Prints,” eight sets of 8” × 10” prints from 830 of his negatives. The only complete set today is housed at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Later that same year the Smithsonian Institution displayed nearly 100 of these prints at a major exhibit, “The World of Edward Weston”, paying tribute to his accomplishments in American photography.

Weston died at his home on Wildcat Hill on New Year’s Day, 1958. His sons scattered his ashes into the Pacific Ocean at an area then known as Pebbly Beach on Point Lobos. Due to Weston's significant influence in the area, the beach was later renamed Weston Beach. He had $300 in his bank account at the time of his death.^[54]

Legacy[link]

Two of Weston's photographs, a nude taken in 1925 and a shell taken in 1927, are among the most expensive photographs ever sold as of 2010.

Cameras and techniques[link]

During his lifetime Weston worked with several cameras.

• 8 × 10 Seneca folding-bed view camera with one of several lenses: a Graf Variable, Wollensak Verito or Rapid Rectilinear^[55]
• 8 × 10 Universal view camera with either a triple convertible Turner Reich or a 19" Protar
• 4 × 5 view camera, type unknown.
• 3¼ × 4¼ Graflex with a ƒ/4.5 Tessar lens^[55][56]

Film and Paper

Prior to 1921 Weston used an orthochromatic sheet film, but after panchromatic film became widely available in 1921 he switched to it exclusively. Notations he made about his exposures indicate that the film he used would be rated approximately equivalent to 16 on the today's ISO scale.^[57] This necessitated very long exposures when using his view camera, ranging from 1 to 3 seconds for outdoor landscape exposures to as long as 4½ hours for still lifes such his peppers or shells.^[58]

The 8 × 10 he preferred was large and heavy, and due to its weight and the cost of the film he never carried more than twelve sheet film holders with him. At the end of each day, he had to go into a darkroom, unload the film holders and load them with new film. This was especially challenging when he was traveling since he had to find a darkened room somewhere or else set up a makeshift darkroom made from heavy canvas.^[59]

In spite of the bulky size of the view camera, Weston boasted he could "set up the tripod, fasten the camera securely to it, attach the lens to the camera, open the shutter, study the image on the ground lass, focus it, close the shutter, insert the plate holder, cock the shutter, set it to the appropriate aperture and speed, remove the slide from the plate holder, make the exposure, replace the slide, and remove the plate holder in two minutes and twenty seconds."^[59]

He printed on several kinds of paper. Initially he used standard silver gelatin paper for his portraits and other early photos, but in Mexico he learned how to use platinum and palladium paper that was imported from England.^[55]

After his return to California, he abandoned platinum and palladium printing due to the scarcity and price of the paper. Eventually he was able to get most of the same qualities he preferred with regular chloro-bromide papers.

Weston always made contact prints, meaning that the print was exactly the same size as the negative. This was essential for the platinum printing that he preferred, since at that time the platinum papers required ultra-violet light to activate.

When he wanted a print that was larger than the original negative size, he used an enlarger to create a larger inter-positive, then contact printed it to a new negative. The new larger negative was then used to make a print of that size.^[60]

Major Exhibitions[link]

In 1970, the Rencontres d'Arles festival (France) presented an exhibition "Hommage à Edward Weston" and an evening screening of the film "Weston the Photographer" by Willard Van Dyke.

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Abbott, Brett. Edward Weston : Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005. ISBN 978-0-89236-809-9
• Bunnell, Peter C. Edward Weston on Photography. Salt Lake City : P. Smith Books, 1983. ISBN 0-87905-147-7
• Bunnell, Peter C., David Featherston et al. EW:100 : Centennial Essays in Honor of Edward Weston. Carmel, Calif. : Friends of Photography, 1986.
• Conger, Amy. Edward Weston in Mexico, 1923–1926. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983. ISBN 0-8263-0665-9
• Conger, Amy (1992). Edward Weston - Photographs From the Collection of the Center for Creative Photography. Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, 1992. ISBN 0-938262-21-1
• Conger, Amy. Edward Weston: The Form of The Nude. NY: Phaidon, 2006. ISBN 0-7148-4573-6
• Edward Weston : Color Photography. Tucson, Ariz. : Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, 1986. ISBN 0-938262-14-9
• Enyeart, James. Edward Weston’s California landscapes. Boston : Little, Brown, 1984.
• Foley, Kathy Kelsey. Edward Weston's Gifts to His Sister. Dayton: Dayton Art Institute, 1978.
• Heyman, There Thau. Seeing Straight: The f.64 Revolution in Photography. Oakland: Oakland Art Museum, 1992.
• Higgins, Gary. Truth, Myth and Erasure : Tina Modotti and Edward Weston. Tempe, Ariz. : School of Art, Arizona State University, 1991.
• Hochberg, Judith and Michael P. Mattis. Edward Weston: Life Work. Photographs from the Collection of Judith G. Hochberg and Michael P. Mattis. Revere, Pa. : Lodima Press,c2003. ISBN 1-888899-09-3
• Hooks, Margaret. Tina Modotti: Photographer and Revolutionary. London: Pandora, 1993.
• Lowe, Sarah M. Tina Modotti and Edward Weston the Mexico Years. London: Merrell, 2004. ISBN 1-85894-245-4
• Maddow, Ben. Edward Weston: Fifty Years; The Definitive Volume of His Photographic Work. Millerton, N.Y., Aperture, 1973. ISBN 0-912334-38-X 0912334398
• Mora, Gilles (ed.). Edward Weston : Forms of Passion. NY: Abrams, 1995. ISBN 0-8109-3979-7
• Morgan, Susan. Portraits / Edward Weston. NY: Aperture, 1995. ISBN 0-89381-605-1
• Newhall, Beaumont (1984). Edward Weston Omnibus : A Critical Anthology. Salt Lake City : Peregrine Smith Books, 1984. ISBN 0-87905-131-0
• Newhall, Beaumont . Supreme Instants: The Photography of Edward Weston. Boston : Little, Brown, 1986. ISBN 0-8212-1621-X
• Newhall, Nancy (ed.). Edward Weston; The Flame of Recognition: His Photographs Accompanied by Excerpts from the Daybooks & Letters. NY: Aperture, 1971.
• Pitts, Terence. Edward Weston 1866–1958. Köln: Taschen, 1999. ISBN 978-3-8228-7180-5
• Stebins, Theodore E., Karen Quinn and Leslie Furth. Edward Weston : Photography and Modernism. Boston : Museum of Fine Arts, 1999. ISBN 0-8212-2588-X
• Stebins, Theodore E. Weston’s Westons : Portraits and Nudes. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1989. ISBN 0-87846-317-8
• Travis, David. Edward Weston, The Last Years in Carmel. Chicago : Art Institute, 2001. ISBN 0-86559-192-X
• Warren, Beth Gates. Edward Weston's Gifts to His Sister and Other Photographs. NY: Sotheby's, 2008.
• Warren, Beth Gates (2001). Margrethe Mather & Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration. NY: Norton, 2001. ISBN 0-393-04157-3
• Watts, Jennifer A. (ed.). Edward Weston : A Legacy. London : Merrell, 2003. ISBN 1-85894-206-3
• Weston, Edward (1964). The Daybooks of Edward Weston, edited by Nancy Nehall. NY: Horizon Press, 1961–1964. 2 vols.
• Weston, Edward. My Camera on Point Lobos; 30 Photographs and Excerpts from E. W.’s Daybook. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1950.
• Weston, Paulette. Laughing Eyes: a Book of Letters Between Edward and Cole Weston 1923–1946. Carmel: Carmel Publishing Co., 1999. ISBN 1-886312-09-5
• Wilson, Charis. Edward Weston Nudes : His Photographs Accompanied by Excerpts from the Daybooks & Letters. NY : Aperture, 1977. ISBN 0-89381-020-7
• Wilson, Charis. Through Another Lens : My Years with Edward Weston. NY:Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. ISBN 086547521
• Woods, John. Dune: Edward & Brett Weston. Kalispell, MT: Wild Horse Island Press, 2003. ISBN 0-9677321-2-3

External links[link]

• A brief biography from the Getty Museum
• edward-weston.com
• Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ
• kimweston.com
• carawestonphotography.com
• Edward Weston's portfolio (138 photos)
• Peppers and Nudes: The Photographer Edward Weston
• A Gallery for Fine Photography
• Eloquent Nude: The Love and Legacy of Edward Weston & Charis Wilson
• All Edward Weston Images Online Center for Creative Photography (CCP) CCP at the University of Arizona has released a digital catalog of all Weston's images.
• Edward Weston: The Photographer (1948 movie) @ weusefilm

a botanical photograph of a succulent plant by Imogen Cunningham

Imogen Cunningham (April 12, 1883 – June 24, 1976) was an American photographer known for her botanical photography, nudes, and industrial landscapes.

Life and career[link]

Cunningham was born in Portland, Oregon in 1883. In 1901, at the age of eighteen, Cunningham bought her first camera, a 4x5 inch view camera, from the American School of Art in Scranton, Pennsylvania. She soon lost interest and sold the camera to a friend. It wasn’t until 1906, while studying at the University of Washington in Seattle, that she was inspired by an encounter with the work of Gertrude Käsebier, to take up photography again. With the help of her chemistry professor, Dr. Horace Byers, she began to study the chemistry behind photography and she subsidized her tuition by photographing plants for the botany department.

After being graduated in 1907 Cunningham went to work for Edward S. Curtis in his Seattle studio, gaining knowledge about the portrait business and practical photography.

In 1909, Cunningham won a scholarship from her sorority (Pi Beta Phi) for foreign study and applied to study with Professor Robert Luther at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden, Germany. In Dresden she concentrated on her studies and didn’t take many photographs. In May 1910 she finished her paper, “About the Direct Development of Platinum Paper for Brown Tones”, describing her process to increase printing speed, improve clarity of highlights tones, and produce sepia tones. On her way back to Seattle she met Alvin Langdon Coburn in London, and Alfred Stieglitz and Gertrude Kasebier in New York.

Dream, a 1910 photograph by Imogen Cunningham

In Seattle, Cunningham opened her studio and won acclaim for portraiture and pictorial work. Most of her studio work of this time consisted of sitters in their own homes, in her living room, or in the woods surrounding Cunningham's cottage. She became a sought after photographer and exhibited at the Brooklyn Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1913.

In 1914 Cunningham's portraits were shown at An International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography in New York. Wilson's Photographic Magazine published a portfolio of her work.

The next year she married Roi Partridge, a teacher and artist. He posed for a series of nude photographs, which were shown by the Seattle Fine Arts Society. Although critically praised, Cunningham didn’t revisit those photographs for another fifty-five years. Between 1915 and 1920 Cunningham continued her work and had three children (Gryffyd, Rondal, and Padraic) with Partridge. In 1920 they moved to San Francisco where Partridge taught at Mills College.

Cunningham refined her style, taking a greater interest in pattern and detail and becoming increasingly interested in botanical photography, especially flowers. Between 1923 and 1925 she carried out an in-depth study of the magnolia flower. Later in the decade she turned her attention toward industry, creating several series of industrial landscapes in Los Angeles and Oakland.

1922 portrait of Margrethe Mather and Edward Weston by Imogen Cunningham

In 1929, Edward Weston nominated 10 of Cunningham's photographs (8 botanical, 1 industrial, and 1 nude) for inclusion in the "Film und Foto" exhibition and her renowned, Two Callas, debuted in that exhibition.

Cunningham once again changed direction, becoming more interested in the human form, particularly hands, and she was fascinated with the hands of artists and musicians. This interest led to her employment by Vanity Fair, photographing stars without make-up. In 1932, with this unsentimental, straightforward approach in mind, Cunningham became one of the co-founders of the Group f/64, which aimed to “define photography as an art form by a simple and direct presentation through purely photographic methods.”

In 1934 Cunningham was invited to do some work in New York for Vanity Fair. Her husband wanted her to wait until he could travel with her, but she refused. They later divorced. She continued with Vanity Fair until it stopped publication in 1936.

In the 1940s Cunningham turned to documentary street photography, which she executed as a side project while supporting herself with her commercial and studio photography. In 1945, Cunningham was invited by Ansel Adams to accept a position as a faculty member for the art photography department at the California School of Fine Arts. Dorothea Lange and Minor White joined as well.^[1]

In 1973, her work was exhibited at the Rencontres d'Arles festival in France through the group exhibition: Trois photographes américaines, Imogen Cunningham, Linda Connor, Judy Dater.

Cunningham continued to take photographs until shortly before her death at age ninety-three on June 24, 1976 in San Francisco, California.

Books[link]

• Imogen Cunningham: Portraiture, 1997 ISBN 0-8212-2437-9
• Imogen Cunningham: On the Body, 1998 ISBN 0-8212-2438-7
• Imogen Cunningham 1883–1976, 2001 ISBN 3-8228-7182-6
• Imogen Cunningham: Flora, 2001 ISBN 0-8212-2731-9
• Imogen Cunningham: Platinum / Palladium, 2012, 21st Editions

Films[link]

• Academy Award Nominated Film Portrait of Imogen Cunningham by Meg Partridge

References[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Imogen Cunningham

External links[link]

• Imogen Cunningham Published Work
• Imogen Cunningham Trust
• Seattle Times Article Out Of The Attic And Into The Light
• Vintage Prints: ArteF Fine Art Photography Gallery, Zürich, Switzerland ArteF Zurich
• Imogen Cunningham papers at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art
• Imogen Cunningham biography and photographs – Photography West
• Imogen Cunningham bio – Photo-seminars