cover image Edward Weston: Forms of Passion

Edward Weston: Forms of Passion

Alan Trachtenberg, Gilles Mora. ABRAMS, $85 (367pp) ISBN 978-0-8109-3979-0

This lavish text-and-picture reconstruction of early-20th-century art photography icon Edward Weston and his work aligns him within the defining cultural dimension of the 1990s: human sensuality. ``Weston's forms are nothing if not sensually motivated,'' writes Mora (Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye), the book's editor and one of five photography historians who here analyze unfolding phases of his artistic development. We are shown his commercial portraiture and pictorialism and the Stieglitz Photo-Secession, Group f.64's unmanipulated style, his ``coherent whole'' discovery in Mexico, an exploration and artistic transformation anew on Guggenheim grants and the pure-photography ``eternalizing'' and ``objectification'' of a universal subject, whether a seashell, a bell pepper (``reeks with sexuality'') or the female form in seemingly limitless sensual variety. More than 50 nude studies are included. (Dec.)