From February 12 to June 2, 2026 CAMERA - Italian Center for Photography in Turin presents Edward Weston. The Matter of Forms, the first major exhibition in Italy dedicated to the American photographer, organized by Fundación MAPFRE in collaboration with the Turin institution. After stops in Madrid and Barcelona, the exhibition project lands in the Italian context, proposing an articulate reading of one of the central figures of modern American photography.
Curated by Sérgio Mah, the exhibition brings together 171 images and takes the form of a true anthology capable of traversing all phases of the production of Edward Weston (Illinois, 1886 - California, 1958), who was active mainly in California until his death in 1958. The exhibition covers a time span from 1903 to 1948, returning a comprehensive view of the author’s linguistic and conceptual evolution, from his early experiences influenced by pictorialism to the full maturity he reached in the field of direct photography. The exhibition proposes a European perspective on Weston’s legacy, placing his work in critical dialogue with the modernism of the continent’s early photographic avant-gardes. In this sense, the selected corpus stands as an aesthetic and theoretical counterpoint to the coeval research developed in Europe, contributing to a reflection on the definition of photography as an autonomous art form during the twentieth century. The course highlights Weston’s role in recognizing and consolidating photography as a poetic and intellectual language. A cofounder of Group f/64 and the Camera Pictorialists of Los Angeles, Weston was an active participant in the debate over the nature of the photographic medium, advocating a vision based on formal precision, clarity of image, and a conscious use of the technical potential of the photographic tool. The exhibition also highlights his contribution in offering a key to understanding the aesthetics and lifestyle of interwar America, a period of profound cultural and social transformation.
A central element of Weston’s practice was his choice of the large-format camera, used to obtain black-and-white images characterized by remarkable sharpness and extremely detailed rendering of surfaces and volumes. The technical rigor, combined with a constant attention to light and the formal structure of subjects, resulted in a diverse body of work that includes still lifes, nudes, landscapes and portraits. Many of these images are now considered seminal in the history of twentieth-century photography. Rooted in the landscape and culture of the United States, Weston’s work is distinguished by an essentiality that helped redefine the boundaries of photographic language. Through the selection presented in Turin, the exhibition offers an articulate perspective on the process of establishing photography as an artistic discipline and the central role it has gradually assumed within contemporary visual culture.
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| Edward Weston on display in Turin: 171 photographs to trace a seminal career |
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