Dody Weston Thompson (April 11, 1923 – October 14, 2012) was a 20th-century American photographer and chronicler of the history and craft of photography. She learned the art in 1947 and developed her own expression of “straight” or realistic photography, the style that emerged in Northern California in the 1930s. Dody worked closely with contemporary icons Edward Weston (her former father-in-law), Brett Weston (her former husband) and Ansel Adams (as an assistant and a friend) during the late 1940s and through the 1950s, with additional collaboration with Brett Weston in the 1980s.
Dody was invited in 1949 to artistically participate with the remaining members of the photographic organization Group f/64, a bastion of the emerging West Coast Photographic Movement. In 1950, she was also one of the founding members of the non-profit organization that published the photographic journal Aperture in 1952, to which she was also a contributor. In 1952, she was co-awarded the prestigious Albert M. Bender Award (known informally in the West as the “Little Guggenheim”) which financed a year's work in photography. Her camera work is represented in dozens of museums and private collections as well as in many photographic books and magazines. She also participated in multiple solo and group exhibitions from 1948 through 2006 in the United States and Japan.
Dody penned commentary on the history of photography and on the techniques of contemporary photographers, focusing on the artistic legacies of Edward Weston and his son Brett Weston. Her articles appeared in many photography books and journals from 1949 through 2003. Her skill in literary criticism was highlighted in her chapter on the novelist Pearl S. Buck in the 1968 book American Winners of the Nobel Literary Prize.
Most popular photographic works Some of her most popular photographic works include: Edward Weston at Rhyolite, Nevada, B/W, 1948 Ghost Town Kitchen, Rhyolite, Nevada, B/W, 1948 Pool with Log, Yosemite, California, B/W, 1949 Black Dune No. 3, Oceano Dunes, California, B/W, 1952 Porch, Marin County, California, B/W, 1952 High Sierra Pool, Yosemite, California, B/W, 1950 Leaves, Garrapata, California, B/W, 1951 White Dune No. 1, Oceano, California, B/W, 1951 Lava Rocks, Greasewood, Owens Lake, California, B/W, 1952 Brett in the Dunes, White Sands, New Mexico, B/W, 1952 Edward's Desk at Wildcat Hill, Carmel, California, B/W, 1954 Edward’s Mailbox at Wildcat Hill, Carmel, California, B/W, 1953 Canal Scene with 'Eros', Venice, Italy, Color, 1976 Ferro No. 1, Venice, Italy, Color, 1977 Rusted Metal Drum, California Desert, Near Owens Lake, California, Color, 1988
Her black and white portraits include those of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Brett Weston.
The West Coast Photographic Movement Famous photographic artists of the West Coast Photographic Movement (also known as Straight photography) took a realistic approach to imagery. They created sharp-focus photographs of natural American Western objects and scenery, skillfully composing with subtleties of tone, light and texture. This approach was entirely radical. From 1910 to the early 1930s, the dominant style was East Coast Pictorialism in which objects were shot with haze and gauze to purposely blur the image for a soft-focus effect. The aim was to mimic Impressionist paintings. With the emerging West Coast Movement, photography no longer imitated painting and developed as a separate art form. The new movement spread in the 1950s as the West Coast artists championed the use of natural environmental forms and clarity of detail—very novel concepts at the time.
Dody's close friends and colleagues were pioneers of realistic photography as well as contemporary artists: Minor White, Charis Wilson (second wife of Edward Weston and the famous model of his nude photographic work), Paul Strand, Dorothea Lange, Wynn Bullock, Don Ross, Ruth Bernhard, Willard Van Dyke, Nata Piaskowski, Beaumont Newhall and Nancy Newhall, and artists Georgia O'Keeffe, Morris Graves and Jean Charlot and his wife Zohmah Charlot.
Biography Early life and work (1923–44) Dody—a childhood nickname that she adopted on her own—was born Dora Harrison on April 11, 1923, in New Orleans. Both her parents were early influences on her later career. Abraham Harrison's profession as a filmmaker offered Dody her first introduction to the sights, sounds and smells of 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, a professional woman, was an artist at heart and surrounded herself with creative friends from the famous French Quarter of New Orleans. 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. Among her mother's circle of associates was the experimental and avant-garde photographer Clarence John Laughlin. His art displayed a strong Impressionistic style. Fourteen-year-old Dody was frequently pressed into service as a model as well as an assistant to carry his props and camera equipment. 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.Aperture Monograph, “Clarence John Laughlin,” Aperture, New York, NY, 1973, pp. 49, 59.Davis, Keith F., Clarence John Laughlin: Visionary Photographers, Hallmark Cards, Kansas City, MO, pp. 28, 75, 91, 100, 113.
Exposure to and experience in the arts Dody's early passions were acting, English literature, and poetry. Her acting career began at the age of three when Hilda recognized her daughter's talents, enrolling her in a children's theater group that toured public schools for the next 10 years. At the beginning of World War II when Dody was a teenager, she appeared in many stage plays in New Orleans and was always the standout in theater reviews. She had found an early creative niche.
Dody was tall, willowy, and had blue eyes. She became a Broadway star in her career. The many outstanding reviews of her acting led to a summer scholarship for Dody with the New London Theatre in New Hampshire. To round out her East Coast experience, she also trained in radio at a station in Springfield, Connecticut, voice work to complement her extensive acting background.
Dody's gift for seeing the simple beauties of nature traces back to those summer theater months in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Raw, untamed vistas left a permanent impression on the young woman and on her future career as a photographer. Dody went on to develop her other artistic skills as a drama and poetry major at Sophie Newcomb College of Tulane University in New Orleans in 1940.
At her mother's urging, Dody transferred to the innovative Black Mountain art college in rural, majestic North Carolina, where she was a student from 1941 to 1943. She took advantage of this unique artistic opportunity and enjoyed the freedom of creativity that underscored the Black Mountain experience.
Many of the school's faculty members were men and women who founded the revolutionary Bauhaus Movement in Berlin. Bauhaus was characterized by classical, unadulterated, pure structure. The colors stressed were black, white, gray and beige. Simplicity and functionality were the by-words. And, in the breathtaking hills of North Carolina, she was once again immersed in pure nature. Dody plunged herself into new ways of seeing simplicity through the various art mediums to which she was exposed.
Becoming a photographer (1944–49) Dody decided to marry her Tulane love Bill Diffenderfer in 1944. The couple left New Orleans and headed to San Francisco where he 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.
Characterizing herself as “an escaped Southerner,” she landed—with an introduction by her mother—a position in San Francisco as a researcher-writer for the West Coast Office of War Information. Dody credits this job for her ability to synthesize tremendous amounts of dry data into striking and fluid artistic words. This skill became characteristic 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. While leaving her shift one afternoon, she noticed a man “capering under a black camera cloth and a big camera on a tripod.” Years later, while working for Ansel, she saw his photograph of a throng of women descending the steps of the shipyard and recognized her own face among the crowd.
In 1946, Dody's war-time marriage unraveled and she divorced. She married a second time, also in 1946, to artist Philip Warren. Unfortunately, Warren became deeply committed to a San Francisco religious movement. She had to decide to either embrace this group or leave the marriage. The couple separated and Dody found a place of her own in San Francisco and began to explore her next step in life.
Naturally drawn to the arts, Dody attended an Edward Weston retrospective organized by Beaumont and Nancy Newhall for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in early 1946. She became absolutely transfixed with the imaginative, naturalistic style of the nascent West Coast photographic trend. Dody subsequently discovered Edward's book California and the West (1940). She determined to learn the craft to which she had been exposed as a young girl.
She then sought out Edward Weston in 1947 at the age of 24. While on summer vacation, she drove from San Francisco to the beach near his studio home in Carmel, contemplating how she would possibly summon the nerve to contact 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.Personal Notes of Dody Weston Thompson, 6 pages, undated, page 3 Intrigued by their common interest in photography, Edward asked Dody to meet with him in 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. Years later she would write privately, “I had never seen anything like these photographs. A wonderful quality of light emanated from them. Some glowed like pearls, some glittered diamond-sharp. Aside from their subject matter, they could be enjoyed solely for this.” Dody described this meeting as “my first stunning lesson in photography.”Personal Notes of Dody Weston Thompson, 6 pages, undated, page 4
Weston mentioned he had just that morning written a letter to Ansel Adams, looking for someone seeking to learn photography in exchange for carrying his bulky large-format camera and to provide a much needed automobile. Edward was developing Parkinson's disease and the physical demands of the profession were difficult for him. This was the era of heavy, wooden large format view cameras with their accompanying tripods, lenses, cut film, film holders, filters and cleansers—all toted around in the field. Dody had a thirst for photography, she had the strong body to carry equipment, and she had driven to Carmel in her own car. There was a swift meeting of creative minds. For the remainder of 1947 through the beginning of 1948, Dody commuted from San Francisco on weekends to learn from Weston the basics of photography.