They created sharp-focus photographs of natural American Western objects and scenery, skillfully composing with subtleties of tone, light and texture.

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.

Dody's close friends and colleagues were pioneers of realistic photography as well as contemporary artists: Minor White, Charis Wilson (second wife of Edward Weston and the famous model of his nude photographic work), Paul Strand, Dorothea Lange, Wynn Bullock, Don Ross, Ruth Bernhard, Willard Van Dyke, Nata Piaskowski, Beaumont Newhall and Nancy Newhall, and artists Georgia O'Keeffe, Morris Graves and Jean Charlot and his wife Zohmah Charlot.

Hilda Rosenfield Harrison, a professional woman, was an artist at heart and surrounded herself with creative friends from the famous French Quarter of New Orleans.

After Hilda's divorce from Harry, Dody always viewed her mother as a strong role model—independent, appreciating the arts, and working hard to earn a living.

Her acting career began at the age of three when Hilda recognized her daughter's talents, enrolling her in a children's theater group that toured public schools for the next 10 years.

To round out her East Coast experience, she also trained in radio at a station in Springfield, Connecticut, voice work to complement her extensive acting background.

At her mother's urging, Dody transferred to the innovative Black Mountain art college in rural, majestic North Carolina, where she was a student from 1941 to 1943.

While on summer vacation, she drove from San Francisco to the beach near his studio home in Carmel, contemplating how she would possibly summon the nerve to contact him.

Aside from their subject matter, they could be enjoyed solely for this.” Dody described this meeting as “my first stunning lesson in photography.”[5] Weston mentioned he had just that morning written a letter to Ansel Adams, looking for someone seeking to learn photography in exchange for carrying his bulky large-format camera and to provide a much needed automobile.

In early 1948, she moved into “Bodie House,” the guest cottage named after its wood stove at Edward's Wildcat Hill compound, as his full-time assistant.

[6][7] Dody helped Edward in the darkroom and she learned the essential skill of spotting his prints — a process to remove imperfections from photographs, rendering them flawless.

On Edward's advice, she acquired her own camera—a wooden Agfa Ansco large format 5”X7” view camera—and began to photograph the panoramic Carmel coast and its subtle intricacies.

[11] He also asked her to edit for this publication portions of his famous Day Books—his intimate journals detailing his evolving photography and comments on his close personal relationships (1950).

Dody was as well a co-founder of the famous journal Aperture, a high-quality magazine for the professional photographer, showcasing the finest images and profiling the field's most acclaimed artists.

Dody chose as her focus to photo-document Edward's creative environment in Carmel as well as the unique home and surroundings of close friend and edgy West Coast painter Morris Graves.

Now in her mid-thirties, she took with her to Tahiti a smaller light-weight, hand-held camera (likely her Yashica Copal Yashicaflex TLR), which she used with less frequency until 1977, and added color film to her photographic repertoire.

Her South Seas folio is replete with fascinating photographs of the Wanderer, on-deck photos of life aboard the ship, colorful prints of Tahitian women and children, and of unique artifacts on shore.

I even chose a camera among the many brands whose ground lens most nearly approximated the look of those in larger cameras.” She eventually selected the Olympus 35mm, which became her constant companion throughout her later years.

In a personal note in her journal she kept while in Italy (1977), she wrote, “I specially fell for the gondolas, not as a craft, but as objects d'art ...pieces of sculpture”... and she captured them exquisitely.

Early in 1958, before Dody left for the South Pacific, she met Daniel Michel Thompson, an aerospace company executive, sculptor and painter, and environmental writer.

[21][22] As the couple's circle of friends and family grew, Dody developed a reputation for her red-hot Louisiana gourmet cooking skills, rooted in her Southern childhood.

As Dody matured, the physical rigors of active photographic expeditions were too difficult to undertake and her professional career shifted to writing, exhibiting and lecturing.

Her final exhibit and public speaking engagement was at Los Angeles Valley College in 2006 as part of the retrospective Perceptions, Bay Area Photography, 1945-1960 curated by Dennis Reed.

In 2006 she received a Certificate of Recognition from the California State Legislative Assembly for her contribution to the fine arts, to the history of photography and as a founder of Aperture magazine.

I like finding rather than accumulating (staging the arrangement of what is photographed)--like an eternal treasure hunt of the eye.” [27] Dody was initially influenced by black and white photography—and it was her first love.

As she mastered her darkroom developing skills, she reports in her journals: I had never realized that this virtually infinite variety of intermediate shades of black and white constituted a unique phenomenon...not to be found in any other medium in the entire history of art...this scale of greys which the skilled photographer---never mind the appearance of the original subject---can expand or contract like an accordion of unknown but variable length pretty much at will.”[27] In the many interviews with Dody and with family members it is clear that the freedom to explore her creativity, to share her insights with the world and to encourage young people to hone their creative skills were the themes of her life.

[1][28] In August 2013, the Thompson Family Trust donated 491 original black-and-white and color prints of Dody's photography and her document archive to Scripps College, Claremont, California.

In September 2016, Helen Harrison donated approximately 150 distinct black-and-white and color prints of Dody's photography, along with copies, to the Inland Empire Museum of Art in San Bernardino County, California.

Photographs from the Collection of Judith G. Hochberg and Michael P. Mattis, Sarah M. Lowe and Dody Weston Thompson, Lodima Press, First Edition, 2003