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”. Over the course of his forty-year career Weston photographed an increasingly expansive set of subjects, including landscapes, still life, 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 inch view camera.
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Ansel Adams
Ansel Easton Adams (February 20, 1902– April 22, 1984) was an American photographer and environmentalist best known for his black-and-white landscape photographs of the American West, especially of Yosemite National Park. With Fred Archer, Adams developed the Zone System as a way to determine proper exposure and adjust the contrast of the final print. The resulting clarity and depth characterized his photographs and the work of those to whom he taught the system. Adams primarily used large-format cameras despite their size, weight, setup time, and film cost, because their high-resolution helped ensure sharpness in his images. Adams founded the Group f/64 along with fellow photographers Willard Van Dyke and Edward Weston. Adams’s photographs are reproduced on calendars, posters, and in books, making his photographs widely distributed.