【50攝影大師介紹】之二, 愛德華·韋斯頓 Edward Henry Weston by 華翰齋

50 Masters of Photography （2） --- Edward Weston

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…" and "one of the masters of 20th century photography."

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.

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" 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 X 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.

In 1947 Weston 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.

中文

本期評論:

雲漫

Edward Weston是我最喜歡的攝影師之一。

Edward Weston和Ansel Adams是F64小組裏麵最著名的兩位大師。他們最大的貢獻之一就是帶領攝影界從模仿繪畫的畫意攝影走出來，強調照相機前所未有的精確記錄細節和影調的能力，為攝影發展成為一門獨立藝術起了關鍵性作用。

可是Weston和Adams的藝術風格又如同相隔遙遠的兩級。Adams的鏡頭下記錄的，是美國西部雄偉的自然風光。看Adams的照片，能感受到攝影師的冷靜客觀，大自然宏大場景被他顯毫畢現地記錄在大幅膠片上。Adams還是嚴格的技術派，他發明的Zone System 使得攝影師能精確完美地控製圖像的影調。而Weston則更象如同一個內心充滿激情又異常敏感的藝術家，他對形狀有著異乎尋常的敏感，他的作品裏讓人過目不忘的不是壯麗河山，是那些看似極為平常的物件和場景：青椒，海螺，樹幹，沙丘。這些極為普通的東西，在Weston的鏡頭下，如同他的人體一樣，竟然是那樣的性感，那樣的婀娜多姿，美麗的難以置信，讓人感慨在藝術家手裏，攝影竟然可以有這樣的化腐朽為神奇的魔力。

當他後來拿到Guggenheim Fellowship, 把鏡頭對準美國西部風景的時候，他也不象Adams那樣拍攝大場景，而是非常善於截取自然界和人類活動的片段，靠構圖和質感給我們帶來一幅幅衝擊力強大的作品。

雖然我非常尊重Ansel Adams，可我從來不是他的嚴格意義上的fan。但每次看Weston的作品，我都會由衷地欽佩一個偉大的攝影師的超乎尋常的藝術眼光和驚人想象力。我覺得對一個藝術家來說，這是最重要的能力。