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.

Some of her most popular photographic works include:

Her black and white portraits include those of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Brett Weston.

Famous photographic artists of this 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 like wildfire 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.

...
Wikipedia