As one of the giants of photography in the first half of the 20th century, viewers will mostly likely approach the work of Edward Weston with preconceived notions. And truthfully, the conventional wisdom, shaped by years and years of critical study and analysis, is pretty accurate. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t revelations to be had in viewing his prints in person. The Akron Art Museum has the good fortune to be showing a collection of more than 100 black-and-white prints assembled by New York-based collectors Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg spanning 40 years — from Weston’s early, imitative efforts to the final picture he made, “The Dody Stones,” which summed up his visual concerns and his technical mastery. The show, Edward Weston: Life Work, is split into seven sections: early work, output from his 1920s Mexican sojourn, portraits from his entire career, nudes, still lifes, early landscapes and late landscapes.
Weston, born in 1886, launched his professional career a few years
after the turn of the century and shot his last picture in 1948, 10
years before he died of Parkinson’s disease. Opening a portrait studio
in 1911, he spent much of the next decade producing the type of
sentimental, soft-focus “pictorial” work then in vogue. A number of
these images are on display, including the technically lush if
overwrought and contrived “Listening to the Fairies,” a platinum-print
portrait of his oldest son. Yet even the early work contains hints of
the Weston whose later obsession with crisply delineated pure form
would leave an indelible mark on photography: A 1915 portrait of George
Hopkins shows the subject in profile, the arc of his head intersecting
with the white circular background, a deft balancing of light and dark
shapes.
Much of the work Weston did in Mexico is strong yet lacks a
distinctive stamp: street scenes, landscapes, portraits. But the work
he would soon embark upon is presaged in two prints of subjects most
people wouldn’t focus on when confronted with exotic foreign
surroundings: “Invalid’s Utensil (Bedpan)” and “Excusado (Toilet).” The
elegance he found in their lines and curves suggests the near
abstractions of his famous future nudes and still lifes of vegetables
and shells. Weston, who wrote copiously of his life and work in his
well-known Daybooks, described the “stately, aloof dignity” of
the bedpan and the “extraordinary beauty” of the toilet, which he said
had “every sensuous curve of the ‘human form divine’ but minus
imperfections.”
Soon, Weston became absorbed in the two very imperfect subjects from
which he drew uncanny beauty. The still lifes he called “quintessences”
include his legendary 1930 “Pepper No. 30,” considered by some to be
his finest image; his clitoral “Nautilus Shell” of 1927; the sweeping,
skirt-like folds of “Cabbage Leaf” (1931). His masterful handling of
light and his detailed prints give their forms three-dimensionality.
The still lifes and nudes seem to split the difference between pure
form and sensuality: The former ooze a sort of warm, animated human
grace, while the latter are cool, detached and anonymous. While “Pepper
No. 30” — its robust, sinuous form outlined in delicate shimmers
of light — clearly resembles a feminine torso (no matter how much
its creator denied that intent), his nudes reduced backs to pear
shapes, buttocks to half-moons and figure studies to tangles of
winding, headless limbs. Though his models were mostly the many women
he was romantically involved with, his photographer’s eye saw them as
formal studies, disassembled forms.
Not surprisingly, Weston’s portraits mostly focus more on formal
concerns than on expressiveness, his handling of the visual elements
becoming its own expressiveness. And while his landscapes displayed a
gradual opening of his vision, incorporating panoramic subjects —
skies full of clouds, fields, dunes and lakes — he abstracted
them in a way that miniaturized them. “Dunes, Oceano” (1936) echoes
“Cabbage Leaf” in its rhythmic aggregation of repeated vertical
ridges.
The gelatin silver prints, taken with an 8 x 10 view camera and
contact printed, show off Weston’s command of tonal range, and his
innate sense of shadow and highlight and their interplay with form.
This particular approach is decidedly untrendy in this era of oversized
razzle-dazzle color photography. Yet the power of their delicacy can’t
be denied.
This article appears in Apr 22-28, 2009.