Edward Weston (1886-1958) is the focus of a 99-image retrospective exhibition entitled “Edward Weston: Life Work.” Containing outstanding vintage prints from all phases of Weston’s five-decade career, “Edward Weston: Life Work” will be on view at the Amon Carter Museum through January 11.

Weston moved to California in 1906 from Illinois and began to earn his living in photography by doing house-to-house portraiture. In 1911 he opened a studio in Glendale taking photographs in the pictorial style, but by 1922 he had reached a turning point in his work. In that year, on a trip back to the Midwest he photographed the Armco Steel plant in Ohio using a direct, sharply focused, strongly composed style. Weston’s repu-tation began to be established as early as 1925, but his photographs never sold well. In 1937 he received the first Guggenheim Fellowship ever awarded a photographer, which gave him the financial freedom to travel and photograph in California, Oregon, Washington and the Southwest.

Throughout the exhibition, previously unpublished masterpieces are interspersed with Weston’s well-known signature images. The rare works on view include a striking 1909 outdoor pictorialist study of Weston’s wife Flora, perhaps his first nude; a 1907 landscape featuring a cow skull on the Mojave Desert; and a smoky view of the Chicago River harbor from 1916 that pays homage to earlier photographers Alvin Langdon Coburn and Alfred Stieglitz. The latter image anticipates the urban modernism Weston famously captured in his seminal photograph “Armco Steel, Ohio,” 1922, which marked his final break from the confines of pictorialism and studio work to the emergence of a sharply focused style.

In the mid-1920s, Weston unleashed his newly trimmed-down approach in Mexico with works such as “Tina Reciting,” 1924, and “Excusado,” 1926. Upon his return to Glendale in 1927, Weston continued to experiment with pure form and disconcerting scale shifts in his long exposures of shells, peppers, mushrooms, radishes and kelp. These studies led naturally into a remarkable set of sculptural nudes done in 1933 and 1934.

Subsequently, Weston turned to the open landscape. This exhibition includes an important suite of six studies made near Oceano, Calif., from 1934 to 1946. In addition to landscapes and studies of desert detritus, portraits of prominent artistic and literary figures are well represented. The chronological survey concludes with Weston’s consummate final photograph, made in 1948 and nicknamed “The ‘Dody Rocks,’ Point Lobos (‘Something out of Nothing’).”

This exhibition is drawn from the private collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg. Most of the works were acquired from members of the Weston family. These include a large collection from his daughter-in-law Dody Weston Thompson, as well as a Weston family album incorporating rare early self-portraits and landscapes.

“Edward Weston: Life Work” is organized and circulated by Curatorial Assistance Traveling Exhibitions, Los Angeles. All works courtesy of the Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg Collection. Admission to the exhibition is free.

On Thursday, December 18, at 5:30 pm, the museum will present the film Remembering Edward Weston, directed by David Turner. On Thursday, January 8, at 6 pm, there will be a lecture entitled “A Scientist Collects Edward Weston” by Michael Mattis. Both events are free.

For information, 817-738-1933 or www.cartermuseum.org.