Edward Weston (1886 1958) is one of the seminal figures of twentieth-century photography. An exponent of straight photography , Weston was committed to making photographs free from technical tricks and incoherent emotionalism which were able to capture the essence of the subject. His series of self-portraits, nudes, landscapes and close-up still-lifes defined modernist photography in their formal elegance, simplicity and abstraction. The first photographer to win a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1937, Weston is among the most influential figures in the history of photography.