Robinson Jeffers

When the poet Robinson Jeffers died in Carmel in 1962, he was largely forgotten by the American public, according to scholar Robert Flagg. This soon changed. In 1965, the Sierra Club published a major book titled "Not Man Apart: Photographs of the Big Sur Coast," which included photography by Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and others, and lines by Jeffers, who spent his lifetime in Carmel meditating on nature and on what he believed was the decline of civilization. "Not Man Apart" was an important moment in the environmental movement and helped position Jeffers as California's greatest poet. (Photo:Robinson Jeffers, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, July 9, 1937. Considered in the public domain).

Edward Weston

Edward Weston (1886-1958), a Carmel resident, was one of the great photographers of the 20th century, ranking with Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams and a handful of others, in the opinion of photography scholar Becky Senf of the University of Arizona. In the 1920s, Weston and other California photographers yanked their medium out of the Victorian doldrums of "pictorialism" and led it into the bright light of modernism, the powerful movement that affected all the arts after World
War I. Weston's skill can be seen in his 1927 creation "Nautilus," on display at the Monterey Museum of Art through July 22. Weston Gallery in Carmel, one of the leading photography dealerships in the world, displays a number of his works.
(Photo credit: Imogen Cunningham's 1922 portrait of Margrethe Mather and Edward Weston)