Tag Archives: Big Sur

I found At Home and Abroad by Cole Weston in Santa Monica at Hennessey + Ingalls Bookshop. Published by Aperture in 1998, both new and used copies are still available from many sources. Here’s an →Amazon link.

Cole Weston (1919-2003) was the youngest son of →Edward Weston and brother of Brett Weston. Edward Weston was, with Ansel Adams, was one of the two foremost American photographers of the 20th Century. For many years, →Cole Weston was responsible for printing his father’s images. Cole eventually came into his own as a leading photographer with an exceptional body of work.

Here is an enlarged version of the iconic cover image, shot on the wild Big Sur coast.

Cole Weston, "Surf and Headlands" California, 1958.

Although Edward Weston’s classic images are all in black and white, Cole Weston was an early adopter of Kodachrome and became a pioneer and leading exponent of color photography. The Weston clan is most closely associated with California, especially Carmel and the Big Sur coast. Cole especially is responsible for many great images close to home. But he also photographed widely across the US and abroad. At Home and Abroad, published just a few years before his death, includes a wide range of his best images from California and across the US and the world from France to New Zealand.

The vast majority of Cole Weston’s images here are landscapes, but they are very personal landscapes. I find some of the most remarkable images in At Home and Abroad to be the nudes incorporated into the environment.

From Paul Wolf’s Introduction:

[Cole’s landscapes … are] characterized by openness to inspiration. His work is fresh, spare, uncluttered… His photography works on purely emotional, dramatic, and aesthetic planes. The lasting value of the pictures is that the viewer, ten, twenty, or thirty years later, can still experience what the photographer felt when the shutter fired.

Wolf quotes a fellow Carmel resident of Weston’s:

Weston’s focus on the landscape may strike some as too traditional. But Webber stresses that “On the East Coast. they may think the straight landscape is dead, but on the West coast, we don’t buy that. You won’t hear it from people like Cole, who were raised next to places like Point Lobos.

Cole Weston, At Home and Abroad. Aperture, 1998.

["What I'm Reading" is a post consisting of less than a full review of a book but rather a more concise mention about something I'm currently reading and find interesting enough to write something about.]