Graham Howe

“Hoppé’s skill as a photographer, his interpretation of Australian identity, the cohesion and national scope of the collection make this one of Australia’s national treasures.” —Linda Groom, curator of pictures, National Library of Australia Photographer E. O. Hoppé journeyed to Australia in the 1930s with the goal of capturing “the true spirit” of the nation. Enthralled by the country and its people, he traveled for a year tirelessly capturing images of life in bustling cities as well as the remote interior. No other photographer had presented such a comprehensive national portrait at the time; his iconic images captured a land both wild and refined. Despite being one of the most famous photographers of the 1920s and 1930s, Hoppé’s work fell into obscurity after World War II. It was not until the publication of E. O. Hoppé’s Amerika that his justly deserved reputation as one of the foremost modernists was restored.

Over the course of his fifty-year career, American photographer Edward Weston (1886-1958) blazed a path into Photo-Modernism rendering portraits, landscapes, still-lifes and nudes. In 1902, a sixteen-year-old Weston took up photography in Highland Park, Illinois, where he worked as an amateur for five years. In 1907, at the age of twenty-one, Weston moved to Tropico, California, now the city of Glendale in Los Angeles County, where he constructed his first studio and set about with great purpose to become a photographic artist. Examining Weston's earliest sharp- and soft-focus photographs reveals that the young artist had already formed a perfect sense of composition that was to be the hallmark of his later work. Presenting Weston's earliest work from a recently discovered family album, Edward Weston: Portrait of the Young Man as an Artist compares the artist's naive first artistic efforts with his latest masterworks to show the persistence and evolution of his singular vision to find essential form in the vernacular with an ever-increasing intensity.As a young man deeply intuitive and original in his creative expression, Edward Weston demonstrates that his teenage work, beginning with his amateur snapshots, embrace the same significant form as the later work for which he is now considered a master.