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Why the KMA Rules August, Continued
Edward Weston’s photographic canon still dazzles
by Heather Joyner Spica
The recent death at age 95 of Henri Cartier-Bresson marks the end of an astonishing era in photography—an era no less influenced by Edward Weston, also a master of the genre. Gone, it seems, are the 20th Century “greats”: men and women who first tackled photographic ideas and approaches we now take for granted. Weston’s body of work in particular—like the vegetables or shells he positioned in front of his camera—exudes both complexity and wholeness. In it we find balance and a remarkably consistent richness given his range of subjects. And that richness, quite evident in an ample collection of prints currently on display at the Knoxville Museum of Art, is yet another reason to visit the museum this month.
Although he was raised in Illinois, Weston created photographs mostly in Mexico and the American West. In 1903, when he was only 17, he exhibited pictures at the Chicago Art Institute. At age 20, he moved to California and opened a commercial studio in what is now Glendale. As an artist and father of four sons, Weston struggled financially throughout much of his life, but he had help from friends, family, and other sources. In the late 1930s, after an association with Alfred Stieglitz and the famed Group f/64 (which included Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham), he received the first two Guggenheim grants ever awarded a photographer.
Weston had numerous lovers and two wives. In her introduction to his published journals or daybooks, Nancy Newhall writes, “When change came to Weston, it nearly always took the shape of a woman.” When death came to him, brought on by Parkinson’s disease in 1958, it was on New Year’s Day in his beloved Carmel. A 30-minute video titled Remembering Edward Weston, presented continuously in the gallery space, provides museum-goers with additional biographical information.
Born 22 years before Cartier-Bresson, Weston exemplifies photography’s transition from a medium dominated by styles in painting to one possessing its own objectives and validity as art. Whereas Cartier-Bresson is associated with the “decisive moment,” that chosen instant when the camera’s shutter is tripped, Weston reflects an entirely different set of photographic concerns, including changes in light throughout long exposures.
Nevertheless, both individuals ultimately sought a directness of vision that’s essential to “straight photography” (defined by Ansel Adams as being “photographs that look like photographs, not imitations of other art forms”).
Straight photography as practiced by Weston paralleled an emerging modernism in other branches of art. Unlike Pictorialism, an early trend in photography characterized by art historian Robert Hughes as being “very soft indeed, seeking Barbizon-style blurs, romantic murk, and often cloying sentimentality,” it promotes realism achieved via straightforward means. But even Weston’s more pictorial images are at times exceptional. For example, his “Portrait of a Woman from the Back” (circa 1920), despite limited depth-of-field reminiscent of Julia Margaret Cameron, is striking in its simplicity. All we see are the woman’s classically beautiful shoulders, neck, and hair in a chignon; her turned-away face remains a mystery and possible symbol of chastity.
Less chaste than his previous work are the many nude images that brought Weston fame. That they are exhibited at one quiet, semi-enclosed end of the sprawling KMA gallery they occupy, presumably in anticipation of children’s tours, reveals what is perhaps an ongoing misinterpretation of the photographer’s drives and intentions. In my mind, Weston’s images of the human body don’t differ much from his landscapes or still-lifes. True, nudity is sensuous. But so are the curves found in Weston’s “Invalid’s Utensil (Bedpan)” from the same time period. Produced in 1930, 13 years after the appearance of Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made urinal titled “Fountain,” the image reminds us of Modernism’s emphasis on the “how” rather than the “what” of art.
Some people perceive Duchamp’s “Fountain” as mere deadpan humor, not art; Weston’s bedpan could likewise be dismissed as an unfortunate if not comic choice of subject matter. Some people might not believe the following remark, made by painter Diego Rivera in reference to Weston’s “Excusado” from 1926 (an image featuring the sculptural base of a toilet): “In all my life I have not seen such a beautiful photograph.” However, Rivera’s assertion makes perfect sense if “Excusado” is described in strictly visual terms. And the exhibition curator’s decision to present prints without accompanying titles (provided instead on laminated pages) furthers the purity of their impact.
In rare instances, Weston’s attention to form versus content works against him—as in a portrait of Rivera sitting on a wall beside a garbage-can lid that visually connects with the eye-popping roundness of his belly. But the dominance of Weston’s unencumbered eye is usually effective. And it’s almost always brilliant. As for the nudity he captured on film, sheer aesthetics took precedence over an expression of anything overtly sexual.
Important to fulfilling Weston’s aesthetic standards was technical mastery.
In his 1929 book titled America and Photography, Weston wrote, “...for the sake of argument, the difference between good and bad art in any medium or of any age lies in the creative mind rather than in skill of hands. The way of seeing is what counts and that is conditioned by the artist’s attitude, not by his skill as craftsman.” Yet a craftsman he was.
He was also a visionary whose images of kelp or of a burned car in the Mojave Desert or of his son Neil sleeping or of cabbage resembling Baroque wood carving have survived the test of time, leaving us all the richer.
August 19, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 34
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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