Often overlookeduntil nowWestons early photography is painterly and luscious This is a book about Edward Weston before he was Edward Westonbefore he was the renowned modernist photographer we know so well. His early years in the field coincided exactly with the height of the Pictorialist movement in America and while he was never a typical practitioner he did make photographs that borrowed themes from paintings and other media and experimented with softfocused imagery that sometimes looks more like graphite drawings or inky dark prints than photographs. He would later disavow the gauzy painterly experiments of his early years claiming in his Daybooks that even as I made the soft artistic work ... I would secretly admire sharp clean technically perfect photographs. Introducing rare surviving prints from the unplumbed holdings of the Lane Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston this book offers new insights into Westons working methods and his evolution as a photographer. By taking a longer and more nuanced view of his early years and by reinserting his first experiments back into the larger story of his artistic production it reveals the variety of ways in which the paths he took as a young man led him to become the mature modernist master. Beautifully reproduced examples of Westons most important early work essays explaining its place in his oeuvre and the history of photography and a section dedicated to the variety of Westons early materials and techniques make this book a musthave resource.show more