Brett Weston

Brett Weston (December 16, 1911—January 22, 1993) was an American photographer. Brett began photographing in 1925 and had his first international exhibition at Film und Foto in Germany at age 17.

Brett had an intuitive very sophisticated sense of abstraction, often flattening the plane and engaging in layered space, an artistic style. He is best known for his work on the dunes around Oceano, California, a location that he later shared with his father Edward Weston, who never learned to drive.

Brett Weston’s work would ultimately became one of the defining poles of contemporary photography with its technical precision, bold design and extremes of abstraction and private imagination. The excitement and tension in his prints were Brett’s unique response to pure form: the vocabulary of line, volume, pattern and light and dark. It was this sensual response to form that defines his more classical European landscapes.

In Weston’s concluding photographs taken during the 1980’s, the abstract was resurrected but this time the playful and less orderly images of writhing reflections in skyscraper windows and the electrifying patterns of light on underwater figures captured his imagination.

By the amazing age of 20, Brett Weston’s work was being exhibited internationally and the world had a glimpse of what was to come. The Curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Van Deren Coke would later observe, "Brett Weston was the child genius of American photography."

- Helena Salvo