Best Weston Peelers

The Illuminating Mind looks at the ideas, images and lives of four major twentieth century American photographers: Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), Paul Strand (1890-1976), Edward Weston (1886-1958) and Ansel Adams (1902-1984). Largely because of their efforts, Americans came to accept photography as a fine art. This book examines the lives of these four photographers within the context of their times, sketching not only their contributions to American modernism, but also their struggles with epistemological and representational questions that echoed throughout American culture. They were all interested in the relationships between the artist and his subject, the knower and the known, the mind and its objects. For them, photography was not passive transcription of the outer world; instead, it is an exploratory process in which the artist interogates and probes that world. Thus they regarded photography as a creative art in which the mind illuminates its subjects, and they believed that a photograph is constituted as much by the artist's contributions as by the subject's trace. Drawing upon rarely used archival manuscripts and forgotten publication, The Illuminating Mind uses a biographical perspective to reveal these artists' unrecognized psychological intricacies, as well as the interrelationships of their creative lives and expressive themes. David Peeler is in the Department of History, United States Naval Academy.