A Young woman sits naked in a doorway with her head bowed, worrying that the crooked part in her hair will ruin the photograph. The woman is Charis Wilson, it is 1936, and the man taking the picture is Edward Weston. Sixty years later, the photograph remains one of the best-known nude studies in the history of photography. Wilson was twenty-one and Weston forty-eight when they met, but the passionate twelve-year relationship between the famous photographer and the intellectual beauty was a true partnership. Wilson became not only the subject of some of Weston's best photographs but also his wife, working partner, and author of several acclaimed books that are illustrated with his work.
A memoir long awaited in the arts community, Through Another Lens tells the story of the life Weston and Wilson led on the Big Sur coast from 1934 to 1946 amid a particularly American (and peculiarly Western) brand of artistic ferment among such figures as Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and Robinson Jeffers. The book features many unpublished family pictures as well as snapshots by Cunningham, Adams, Willard Van Dyke, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, and others; of course, Weston's own extraordinary photographs are here, too, some of which have rarely been seen outside private collections.
