“THE GREATEST COLLECTION OF PHOTOGRAPHS BY EDWARD WESTON EVER PUBLISHED”: LIMITED EDITION OF EDWARD WESTON, ONE OF ONLY 350 COPIES, SIGNED BY WESTON’S SON COLE, WITH A LARGE MOUNTED GELATIN SILVER PRINT OF “CHINA COVE, POINT LOBOS, 1940,” PRINTED BY COLE WESTON AND SIGNED BY HIM ON MOUNT VERSO

(WESTON, Edward) WESTON, Cole and MADDOW, Ben. Edward Weston. His Life and Photographs. Revised Edition. WITH: Gelatin silver print. “China Cove, Point Lobos, 1940.” (Millerton, New York): Aperture, (1979). Large oblong quarto, original tan cloth, photographic endpapers, original slipcase. With: Gelatin silver print (7-1/2 by 9-1/2 inches) mounted on heavy card stock (total 12 by 15 inches), penciled signature and captioning on the verso, original cardboard portfolio. $5200.

Signed limited edition, number 258 of only 350 copies of this magnificent folio photobook, each signed by Edward Weston’s son Cole and executor, with an exhibition-size gelatin silver print of “China Cover, Point Lobos, 1940,” printed by Cole Weston from an original negative made by Edward Weston.

Edward Weston’s influential body of work ranks “him as a major artist, a man whose work has changed our perception of what the world and life are like” (Szarkowski, Looking at Photographs, 84). This definitive limited edition of only 350 copies memorably commemorates that legacy. Accompanied by an exhibition-size mounted gelatin silver print of “China Cove, 1946,” printed by Weston’s son Cole from an orginal negative by Edward Weston, and signed on the mount verso by Cole Weston, this impressive volume is further signed on the limitation page by Cole. Featured are 60 large full-page photogravures, each printed on a hand selected sheet and at the same size as Weston’s original print. As Cole Weston notes, this tribute to his father’s work is especially meaningful in that “there are few records left of his work, except for those in museum collections and in family photo albums; the rest he destroyed” (85). The folio begins in the 1920s with Weston’s luminous nudes, portraits of D. H. Lawrence, Tina Modotti and Diego Rivera, and striking landscapes from his years in Mexico. It continues with sublime images of California and Point Lobos, his iconic nature abstractions, his epic series on the American West, and ultimately covers his final years, in which Weston traveled nearly 20,000 miles on a commissioned work to illustrate Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Finally weakened by Parkinson’s disease, Weston returned to Point Lobos at the end of his life and it is there, as Cole Weston movingly recalls, that “he made his last negative in 1948.” Revised and considerably expanded edition of a 1973 work titled Edward Weston. Fifty Years. Featuring an illustrated biography by Ben Maddow, over 30 in-text photogravures, and an afterword by Cole Weston. With additional signed limitation page, unnumbered, bound in after the signed and numbered limitation page. Mounted gelatin silver print with penciled captioning on mount verso: “PL40-K-4” and “China Cover. Point Lobos. 1940” (print image seen in the folio on p. 299), further captioned with the printed: “Negative by Edward Weston[facsimile signature]” above “Print by” [penciled signature of] Cole Weston.” The mounted print is in protective mylar and housed in a heavy cardboard portfolio. Numerical notation of “COO2472” on portfolio cover.

Text and plates fresh and clean with minor tape reinforcement to one inner paper hinge (84-5) of near-fine folio. Print fine.