“ONE OF THE GREATEST ARTISTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY”: WESTON’S MY CAMERA ON POINT LOBOS, WITH 30 FOLIO-SIZE DUOTONES

WESTON, Edward. My Camera on Point Lobos. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950. Folio, original spiral-bound black paper boards. $750.

First trade edition of Weston’s photographic tribute to his beloved Northern California coastline, with 30 beautiful folio-sized duotone plates, together with excerpts from Weston’s daybook and a tribute by Ansel Adams.

“Edward Weston is one of the greatest artists of the 20th century” (McDarrah, 529). An early leading Pictorialist, Weston fundamentally altered his style in the late 1920s to achieve “a body of work that would come to identify him as a major artist, a man whose work has changed our perception of what the world and life are like” (Szarkowski, Looking at Photographs, 84). My Camera on Point Lobos, with 30 exhibition-size duotone plates of photographs taken from 1929-1948, contains many of Weston’s finest images of his beloved Northern California. It is a work that proclaims “a technique of great power and unique simplicity. Here are no frills and mannered complexities, no distortions of the medium in its most straightforward form. Both the negative and the prints have emerged from a darkroom which is equipped with the fewest necessities of the craft… Yet from this simple installation comes some of the great photography of our time” (Ansel Adams, “A Note on the Photographs”). With an introduction by Weston’s last assistant and later his daughter-in-law, Dody Weston. Issued the same year as an advance copy for subscribers (250 copies) containing a duotone print. Without scarce dust jacket.

Plates generally fresh with light margin dampstaining minimally affecting the edges of some rear plates, light edge-wear, rubbing to fragile original boards.