CARMEL, Calif. — There's looking at a seascape. And there's really looking at a seascape, so engrossed in the beach, rocks, light and textures that you find yourself in a sea cave gazing through a camera lens, a wave exploding at the cave entrance.

This was me a couple of weeks ago on Garrapata Beach, seven miles south of Carmel. Amid all the painters, poets, golfers and movie gunslingers who have dominated Carmel's life in the last century, this rugged coastline is also a key territory in the history of American photography.

Photography pioneer Edward Weston, who haunted Point Lobos for much of the 1930s and '40s, won worldwide respect for fine-art photography with his meticulous, unsentimental, nearly abstract images of nature.

Then came sons Brett, a prodigy who shot black and white, and Cole, a late bloomer who shot mostly color.

The Westons' work has made this area of Monterey County a destination and a geo-character in American visual culture, like Georgia O'Keeffe's New Mexico, David Hockney's Los Angeles or Ansel Adams' Yosemite.

Thinking about Carmel this way can make all the difference for a visitor weary of cute cottages and high-end retail.

Instead of strolling on predictable Carmel Beach at the foot of Ocean Avenue, turn left on Scenic Road and follow it to Carmel River State Beach.

Head south to Garrapata State Park, where rocks and water do astounding things on 2 miles of often-empty beach, or to Big Sur beyond that. Bunk down in a guest cabin on Wildcat Hill, where Weston and his family built their home. I did that and walked the trails of Point Lobos with my landlord: Kim Weston, 53, grandson of Edward, son of Cole and, yes, a photographer. He leads workshops and shoots mostly nudes, rarely landscapes. His reasoning is understandable.

"See that dead cypress tree branch there?" he said at an overlook near Pinnacle Cove. "Edward shot that in 1929. Everywhere I look, there's one of Edward's photos. Or one of Brett's. Or one of my dad's."

When Edward Weston moved to Carmel in 1929, it was an artists' colony and playground for the wealthy.

He was 42, the son of a Midwestern doctor, a photographer with little money but a growing reputation, a father of four who was separating from their mother. He planned to shoot portraits of Carmel's high society.

But the trees and rocks intrigued him more than the people. Weston made some of his most admired pictures during his first six years here, including his most famous image, a 1930 still life of a pepper that resembles a well-muscled torso.

Weston left Carmel in 1935 but returned three years later, settling on property provided by the father of Charis Wilson, his 24-year-old wife-to-be.

The land, 4 miles south of Carmel, lies a mile from Point Lobos. Weston would spend hours at water's edge, composing frames of wind and surf, cypress and succulent, seaweed and sand. He wrestled with a heavy tripod and a wooden view camera, loading 8-by-10-inch negatives one at a time.

"Art is based on order. The world is full of sloppy Bohemians and their work betrays them," he wrote in his journal.

A few months later, he added, "I get a greater joy from finding things in nature, already composed, than I do from my finest personal arrangements."

While his sons forged their own careers and Charis Wilson moved on, Edward Weston dug in, surrounded by cats. He shot at Point Lobos until 1948, when Parkinson's disease cut short his career. He lived in the cabin until his death in 1958.

At Wildcat Hill 49 years later, the tiny darkroom is still largely as Edward had left it — walls painted black, developing trays on a shelf, family photos leaning here and there.