Dody Weston Thompson (April 11, 1923 – October 14, 2012) was a 20th-century American photographer and chronicler of the history and craft of photography. In 1947, she learned the art and created her own style of realistic or straight photography. This was the style that first emerged in Northern California in 1930s. Dody worked closely during the 1940s and 1950s with Edward Weston, her father-in-law, Brett Weston, and Ansel Adams as an assistant and friend. Brett Weston was also involved in the 1980s.
Dody was invited to participate artistically with the rest of the Group f/64 photographic organization, a bastion in the West Coast Photographic Movement. She was also a founding member of the non-profit organization that published Aperture, a photographic journal, in 1950. In 1952, she received the Albert M. Bender Award, also known informally as the “Little Guggenheim” in West. This award funded a year of photography work. Her work with the camera is featured in numerous museums and private collections, as well as in many magazines and photographic books. From 1948 to 2006, she participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in both the United States of America and Japan.
Dody wrote commentary about the history of photography as well as on contemporary techniques. She primarily focused on the artistic legacy of Edward Weston (and his son Brett Weston) and outlined their thoughts. From 1949 to 2003, her articles were published in many magazines and photography books. Her literary criticism skills were highlighted in her chapter about Pearl S. Buck, a novelist, in the 1968 book American winners of the Nobel Literary Prize.
Table of Contents
- 1 Biography
- 1.1 Early life and work (1923-44) /h3>Dody, a nickname she took from her childhood and adopted by herself, was born Dora Harrison in New Orleans on April 11, 1923. Both her parents were early influences on her later career. Abraham Harrison’s career as a filmmaker gave Dody her first exposure to the sights, sounds, and smells involved in film processing. Known as Harry Harrison, he was first a minor league ball player, then a newspaper photographer and finally a producer of the famous Fox Movietone News, the short news and sports newsreels that played from 1928 until 1963 in theaters before the feature films. Hilda Rosenfield Harrison was a professional woman but an artist at heart. She was surrounded by creative friends from New Orleans’ famous French Quarter. After Hilda’s divorce from Harry, Dody always viewed her mother as a strong role model–independent, appreciating the arts, and working hard to earn a living. While a teen in New Orleans, Dody was exposed to Pictorialism. Clarence John Laughlin, an avant-garde and experimental photographer, was one of her mother’s close friends. His art displayed a strong Impressionistic style. Dody, a fourteen-year-old boy, was often called upon to serve as both a model and as an assistant for his camera equipment and props. Laughlin’s photos were considered unique because they were often posed in New Orleans graveyards–beautiful but macabre. One of his most famous works depicts the surreal face of Dody hidden behind a half-mask above a cemetery. Exposure to and experience in the arts
- 1.2 Career turning point (1949)
- 1.3 Writing and impact on art history
- 1.4 Marriage to Brett Weston (1952)
- 1.5 Photography career builds (1953-55)
- 1.6 South Seas voyage (1958)
- 1.7 Partnership with Daniel M. Thompson (1960-2008)
- 1.8 Rare Dody Weston Thompson Photographs June 14 - August 31 1997 Monterey Museum Art
- 1.9 Brett Weston At One Hundred
- 1.10 Black and White Magazine, June, 2005 Issue 37
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Biography
Dody decided to marry her Tulane love Bill Diffenderfer in 1944. They left New Orleans for San Francisco, where Bill was stationed during World War II. Dody’s goal at this point was to find a way to earn a living in an unfamiliar environment.
She describes herself as “an escapee Southerner” and landed, with the help of her mother, in San Francisco as a researcher/writer for West Coast Office of War Information. Dody attributes this job to her ability to combine vast amounts of data into striking, fluid artistic words. This ability was a hallmark of her later writing.
She also worked as a freighter riveter at the Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, California across the Bay from San Francisco. Fortuitously, photographers Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange were hired by Fortune Magazine in 1944 to photo-document a 24-hour sequence of the workers at the shipyards. One afternoon she was leaving work and saw a man “capering underneath a black camera cloth with a big camera mounted on a tripod.” She later recognized her face in the photo of a group of women ascending the shipyard steps and worked for Ansel.
Dody’s wartime marriage fell apart in 1946 and she was forced to divorce. She married a second time, also in 1946, to artist Philip Warren. Warren was deeply committed to the San Francisco religious movement. She was forced to choose between embracing this group and leaving her marriage. Dody and her husband split and Dody moved to San Francisco. She began exploring her next steps in life.
Dody was naturally drawn to the arts and attended an Edward Weston retrospective that Beaumont and Nancy Newhall organized for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It took place in 1946. She became absolutely transfixed with the imaginative, naturalistic style of the nascent West Coast photographic trend. Dody later discovered Edward’s book California (1940). She determined to learn the craft to which she had been exposed as a young girl.
At the age of 24, she sought Edward Weston out. She drove from San Francisco to Carmel to visit his studio, and pondered how she could get in touch with him. In her own words in a private journal, she wrote, “I had been given courage. Before it could ebb, I found a public phone and dialed”–and she reached Edward himself. Edward and Dody became so interested in photography that they asked Dody to meet them within an hour.
After she arrived at his surprisingly modest bluff-side studio, he showed her, according to Dody’s memoirs, print after print of his platinum-developed photographs. She would later write in private that she had never seen photographs like them. A wonderful quality of light emanated from them. Some sparkled like diamonds, while others sparkled like pearls. Dody said that they could enjoy their subject matter aside from photography.
Weston said that he had written Ansel Adams a letter just the morning, asking for help in learning photography. He was looking for someone to carry his large-format camera and provide an automobile. Edward was suffering from Parkinson’s disease, and the physical demands of his profession made it difficult for him. This was the age of large format, heavy wooden view cameras. They came with tripods, lenses and cut film holders. Filters, filters, cleansers, filters, and other equipment that could be used to carry them around. Dody was passionate about photography and had the strength to transport her equipment. She had even driven herself to Carmel in her car. It was a quick meeting of creative minds. Dody commuted to San Francisco every weekend for the rest of 1947 and the beginning of 1948 to learn from Weston.
Edward encouraged Dody to become a portrait photographer to generate revenue for herself, which he himself had done in his early career. Her solid portraiture work earned her a reputation as a photographer and she opened her own studio in San Francisco.
In early 1948, she moved into “Bodie House,” the guest cottage named after its wood stove at Edward’s Wildcat Hill compound, as his full-time assistant. Dody helped Edward in the darkroom and she learned the essential skill of spotting his prints — a process to remove imperfections from photographs, rendering them flawless. On Edward’s advice, she acquired her own camera–a wooden Agfa Ansco large format 5″X7″ view camera–and began to photograph the panoramic Carmel coast and its subtle intricacies.
In 1949, her reputation caught the attention of Ansel Adams. She assisted the famed photographer for a year during a photographic expedition in Yosemite National Park and then at his studio in San Francisco. Dody learned his celebrated Zone System–his systematic method for precisely defining the relationship between the way the photographer visualizes the photographic subject (determining film exposure) and the final product (development of the film). She also observed how Ansel greatly improved the standards of print reproduction.
Dody returned to Wildcat Hill after her experience in Ansel’s studios. Many famous and cutting-edge photographers, artists and poets gathered there around Edward Weston’s lively dinner table.
Dody later created a photographic series that complemented the poetry of Emily Dickinson. This body of work, though not published, is a tribute to Dody’s love for poetry and showcases Dody’s ability to combine photography and text.
Career turning point (1949)
Nineteen forty-nine was a professionally pivotal year for Dody. Dody was invited to participate artistically with the rest of the Group f/64. The group was an association of San Francisco Modernist artists who spearheaded straight photography. Ansel Adams suggested the group’s name after Ansel Adams and William Van Dyke founded it in 1932. f/64 is the lens setting which allows all features in an image to sharply focus.
Dody’s early camera work then began to be exhibited, purchased and represented in a number of museums and private collections, including the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (1949) and the Chicago Institute of Design (1950).
Dody was the last of Edward Weston’s photographic assistants and remained very close to him during the final 11 years of his life as he struggled with his Parkinson’s. The final photographs Edward Weston ever took were of a close-up of beach stones, teasingly subtitled “Dody Rocks”, and of a portrait of Dody against boulders, at Point Lobos, California (1948).
Writing and impact on art history
Weston recognized Dody’s considerable writing talent and entrusted her to craft the preface to My Camera on Point Lobos in 1949, launching her prolific writing career. He asked her to also edit portions of his Day Books, his intimate journals that detail his photography progress and his comments about his personal relationships (1950).
Dody was as well a co-founder of the famous journal Aperture, a high-quality magazine for the professional photographer, showcasing the finest images and profiling the field’s most acclaimed artists. The first issue of the 1952 Spring issue was published after two years of preparation. Dody was a contributing writer.
The periodical was named for the size of the opening in a camera lens that determines how much light reaches the film. The aperture is a numerical setting printed on the barrel. The greater the number, the better the scene will focus. This allows for manipulation of the scene’s depth of field.
Dody wrote extensively about photography and fine art (see Bibliography). Paula Chamlee, a famous photographer, admires Dody’s writing style and says that Dody’s published works have “contributed significantly to the history and evolution of photography.”
Marriage to Brett Weston (1952)
Theodore Brett Weston (1911-1993) developed a more abstract polish to his photographic craft. He served in the Signal Corps in New York during World War II and returned afterward to Carmel to live, first at Wildcat Hill and later in 1948 at Garrapata Canyon (10 miles south of Wildcat Hill), to work in his father’s darkroom and to pursue his own photography. Dody and he became close friends as they shared their photographic projects and enjoyed meals together. Understanding how fond Edward was of Dody, Brett kept at first a respectful distance, but by March 1950 Dody and he were dating and Dody moved to Brett’s home at Garrapata Canyon.
In 1951, Ansel asked Dody and Brett to work with the Polaroid Corporation’s Artist Support Program to test its latest self-developing camera, the Polaroid 95 Land Camera and Type 40 film. This first instant camera produced sepia-tone prints that developed in one minute. They embarked on a photographic safari across California and New York. Their resulting work was the basis of advertisements for the camera, appearing in many contemporary popular magazines.
Having the experience of working well together, the road trips continued to great success. In 1952, they both captured some of their most memorable photos at the White Sands of New Mexico. Dody photographed Brett in the Dunes during that trip. The couple also took photos in Carmel Valley in that same year. They collaborated on many projects and complimented each other with their photos and well-written commentary.
Edward Weston’s health was slowly declining due to Parkinson’s disease. He was unable collect 100 of his finest prints for his 50th Anniversary Portfolio, 1952. Dody produced 8,250 prints using Edward’s 825 prime negatives. On the front endpaper of Dody’s copy of the 50th Anniversary Portfolio, Edward affectionately wrote, “To Dody-who printed & sweated & spotted, so that this Portfolio becomes her Portfolio-Love always-Edward.”
Dody and Brett eventually married at Point Lobos in Carmel, California on December 6, 1952. Dody, who married Brett, became Dody Weston professionally. However, Dody chose to call her work “Dody” instead. Dody later described how difficult it was for she and Brett to survive as creative artists, “We never knew where the next pot of beans was coming from, but it always appeared.”
Photography career builds (1953-55)
Dody’s photographic career ignited in 1952 when she was one of the two photographic winners of the prestigious Albert M. Bender Award (known informally in the West as the “Little Guggenheim”), which financed a year’s work in photography. Ansel Adams was the first photographer to receive the award in 1946. Dody was the second recipient of the award. Dody chose as her focus to photo-document Edward’s creative environment in Carmel as well as the unique home and surroundings of close friend and edgy West Coast painter Morris Graves.
In 1954-55, she and photographer Nata Piaskowski were curators for the ground-breaking exhibit titled Perceptions–a gallery exposition organized by a San Francisco Bay area photographer’s collective. The San Francisco Museum of Art sponsored the show. Famed architect and photographer Donald Ross designed this artistic project. Perceptions was displayed at the Smithsonian Institution as well as abroad.
Unfortunately, Dody’s marriage to Brett became unsatisfying by 1955 and she moved to Los Angeles. Their divorce was finalized in 1957, after a failed reconciliation attempt in 1956. Dody’s move to Southern California became permanent and she searched for a creative project. She found employment as a documentary consultant, researcher, writer and crew member with Hollywood producer Lou Stoumen from 1956 to 1960.
Her screen credits include a Motion Picture Academy Award-nominated documentary The Naked Eye (1956), highlighting Edward’s work. Recognition was also given to her for Stouman’s Documentary Short Subject Oscar winner The True Story of the Civil War (1957), in which she extensively used still photos by Mathew Brady, a Civil War photographer.
South Seas voyage (1958)
In 1958, she signed on for an exciting opportunity aboard the actor Sterling Hayden’s schooner Wanderer as a filmmaker’s assistant. Hayden, in the middle of a very nasty public divorce, made headlines by taking two of his four children on the voyage, contrary to court orders. The crew sailed from San Francisco Bay to Tahiti, where Hayden had planned to film a movie.
In her mid-thirties she brought with her to Tahiti an even smaller, lighter-weight, handheld camera (likely her Yashica Copal Yashicaflex TLR). She used this camera less frequently until 1977 when she added color film to her photographic collection. Her South Seas folio is replete with fascinating photographs of the Wanderer, on-deck photos of life aboard the ship, colorful prints of Tahitian women and children, and of unique artifacts on shore.
The film did not materialize, however, and according to Dody’s notes U.S. Camera published her photos of paradise in 1961. Dody continued shooting black-and-white photography until 1966. She was also tapped to write a chapter on famous novelist Pearl Buck for American Winners of the Nobel Literary Prize, published in 1968.
h3>
Color photography (1970s-1991)
Dody’s career in color photography was of necessity. “My body decreed: carry no weight. It was going to be a 35mm camera or nothing. Or I would have to change my standards. I even chose a camera among the many brands whose ground lens most nearly approximated the look of those in larger cameras.”
She eventually selected the Olympus 35mm, which became her constant companion throughout her later years. The camera was designed for action. I refused to let go of the joy I felt in seeing… it wasn’t until I reached Venice, vulnerable, rotting and splendid, that I gave in to the seductions offered by color… color bold, subtle, nuanced, a veritable pot of color.
Some of the most splendid of her color photographs are of the famous gondolas on the Grand Canal in Venice. She wrote in a journal that she kept in Italy (1977): “I fell in love with the gondolas not as a craft, rather as objects d’art…pieces de sculpture and they were captured exquisitely.”
Some of her most iconic color photos were taken on her trips to Hawaii, Italy and France.
Partnership with Daniel M. Thompson (1960-2008)
Early in 1958, before Dody left for the South Pacific, she met Daniel Michel Thompson, an aerospace company executive, sculptor and painter, and environmental writer. Mutual friends had invited them to a dinner party in Los Angeles and they discovered their personalities and interests were compatible. It was hard for her to make the decision to leave for Tahiti, and to be apart from Dan. They dated for two more years, and they were married in November 1960. A great partnership ensued and Dan helped research and edit her writings over the next 40 years.
During this phase of her career, her photography was known under the professional name of Dody Weston Thomson. Dody contributed to a 1965 article in Aperture Monograph edited by Nancy Newhall: Edward Weston, Photographer. Her major written work was her personal recollection of Edward Weston entitled “Edward Weston: A Memoir” published in the Canadian journal, Malahat Review, in 1970 and in 1972.
Dody’s reputation for her Louisiana-inspired gourmet cooking skills, which were rooted in her Southern roots, grew as the couple’s circle grew. She and Dan hosted many memorable dinners at their Los Angeles home.
h3>
Later years: writing, lecturing and exhibiting (1980-2006)
Dody grew up and realized that active photographic expeditions were too physically demanding. Her professional career changed to writing, lecturing, and exhibiting. Dody spent her final years exhibiting and working on document projects, writing about photography, Edward Weston’s legacy, and lecturing at many colleges, art museums, and fine arts institutions.
Dody took her final black-and-white photograph in 1966 and her last color photograph of wet kelp on a tide pool rock at Point Lobos in 1997. In 2006, her final exhibit was at Los Angeles Valley College. Dennis Reed curated the retrospective perceptions, Bay Area Photography 1945-1960. Dody gave the opening lecture and her image White Dune No. The show featured 1/i>. Reed reports that Dody was instrumental in helping him develop the installation. Thus, Dody’s career extended 59 years (1947-2006).
The most significant article she wrote during this time period was “West Coast ’50s” about the West Coast Photographic Movement, which was published in Exposure Magazine in 1981. Her last article, which reflected on Edward Weston’s lasting contribution, was published in Weston : Life Work (2003).
Of all the many symposiums in which she participated, the most significant was the May, 1998 panel in San Francisco, “Through Another Lens: A Historical and Critical Look at California Arts Photography in the 1930s & 1940s”. This stellar forum included Dody, Charis, Cole (Edward Weston’s youngest son) Rondal Partridge (son of photographer Imogen Cunningham) and Seema Weatherwax (former assistant to Ansel Adams).
She was awarded a Certificate for Recognition by the California State Legislative Assembly in 2006 for her contributions to photography history and to the fine arts.
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Last update 2021-08-06