Brett Weston; Landscape Photographer

Brett Weston, son of pioneering modern photographer Edward Weston and himself renowned for his artistic black and white photographs of California landscapes and nature, has died at age 81.

Weston died Friday at the Kona Hospital on the Big Island of Hawaii after suffering a stroke, said his nephew, Matthew Weston of the Weston Gallery in Carmel.

The famed second generation photographer astounded and upset art and photography circles in late 1991 when he celebrated his 80th birthday by burning 75 of his most important negatives. Maintaining a lifelong pledge to himself, Weston burned or chemically defaced all but 12 of the thousands of negatives he had produced since he took up photography as a teen-ager.

“No one can print another photographer’s negatives,” he said in his 1980 monograph, “Brett Weston: Photographs from Five Decades.”

“It’s just too personal,” he wrote. “There are infinite choices to make. It’s partly a matter of mood. You have to work with enthusiasm. When I’m back from the field, I like to hit the darkroom that night and print the next morning.

“The continuation of the flow of excitement is very important,” he said, “and I’m always excited in the darkroom. Hell, I can’t work on my old prints anymore. There’s no enthusiasm unless I can find a way to make a better print.”

The remaining 12 negatives will be given to the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson.

His father, Edward, had willed his negatives to another son, Cole, who made a career of making carefully labeled prints.

Born in Los Angeles, Brett Weston studied photography with his father and in 1929 they established a studio in San Francisco. He later settled in Carmel in the enclave of photographers presided over by the late Ansel Adams.

In the 1940s, Brett Weston helped Adams form the Friends of Photography, which opened a national headquarters and museum for photography in San Francisco in 1989. The museum is called the Ansel Adams Center.

As a free-lance photographer, young Weston accepted assignments from film studios and airplane factories in California and New York. As he matured, he gravitated to artistic photography, concentrating on landscapes and close-ups of nature in his native California and around the world.

“He is the first successful artistic heir in the history of photography,” R.H. Cravens wrote in Weston’s 1980 monograph, introducing the photographer’s vast body of work. “His father, Edward Weston, expanded the medium with the credo that ‘the camera should be used for the recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself.’

“If the father was a pioneer,” Cravens wrote, “the son is a warrior who set out to conquer ‘the thing itself.’ He has imbued his subjects with a unique personal imprint. And in his extraordinary abstraction, Brett Weston has established photography’s most powerful affinity with the great modern artists.”

Weston published several books of his photographs, including: “San Francisco,” in 1938, “White Sands” in 1949, “New York” in 1951, “Brett Weston Photographs” in 1956, “Baja California” in 1967, “Japan” in 1970, “Europe” in 1973, “Brett Weston: Voyage of the Eye” and “Oregon,” both in 1975, and “Portraits of My Father” in 1976.

He exhibited in galleries and museums in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Boston, and in Stuttgart, Germany, Ottawa and London.

Weston is survived by a daughter, Erica, of Carmel.