Edward Weston began his photographic
career as a portrait photographer in California in 1907. After a brief stint of
house-to-house portraiture, he enrolled in the Illinois School of Photography.
In 1911, after apprenticing with two Los Angeles portrait studios, he opened
his own studio. Today, Weston is renowned for the pure, formal photographic style
to which he turned in frustration in the early 1920s. Examples of the Pictorialist
style which dominated his early works are few, but those which have survived
manifest qualities later recognized as Weston's style. Exquisite balance of
formalist elements, sculptural use of light, and uncluttered, spare
compositions are threads that form the fabric of his entire oeuvre.

Spencer Kellogg, Jr. was a Pictorialist
photographer active in Buffalo during the first third of the twentieth century.
With a mutual friend, Johan Hagemeyer, Kellogg traveled to California to visit
the photographer in 1920. At that time, the three men collaborated on a series
of portraits taken in Weston's studio, including this and another one of Kellogg.
A sense of mystery pervades the photograph in which, cloaked and in shadow, Kellogg
seems to emerge from the indeterminate background as if from another world.