Word: westons
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...centennial of Weston's birth this year is being marked by three museum shows. The J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, Calif., will exhibit 45 of his pictures later this month. Sixty are going up in December at the Art Institute of Chicago. But the real Weston juggernaut opened earlier this month at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: a sweeping retrospective of 237 prints. Organized by the University of Arizona's Center for Creative Photography and selected by Beaumont Newhall, the gray eminence of photo history, the exhibition will run in San Francisco through Feb. 15, then travel...
...dual nature unified in Weston's work was evident early in his life. He was 20 when he left his home in a Chicago suburb to visit a sister living in a quiet town near Los Angeles. Eventually he was married there, established a portrait business and fathered the four sons whom he loved fiercely all his life. But a part of him resisted domestication just as fiercely. He found his friends and lovers among the pioneer enclaves of the West Coast counterculture, attic dwellers who shared his penchant for vegetarianism and modern...
...Weston was among the generation of photographers whose conversion to sharp focus from soft-edged pictorialism was the hinge on which the rest of the century's camerawork would turn. By the early 1920s he had already established an international reputation for mildly swoony images in gray-beige tones. He had also grown restless with pictorialism, which took its inspiration from impressionism, symbolism and the damper moments of Whistler. In time, he found a new expressive vocabulary in the angles and hard lines of constructivism and cubism, which he matched to a new photographic method. The focus was sharp...
With his peerless instinct for composition, Weston could soon reconfigure the female nude to find the fracture lines of Braque or the seamless forms of Brancusi. But it took a personal and artistic crisis in 1923 to push him beyond ingenious deployments of volume and line. He took off for Mexico with his lover Tina Modotti and one of his sons. He spent the next three years rubbing shoulders with the muralist Diego Rivera, dodging the postrevolutionary turmoil and making pictures under the Mexican sun that specifies every object it falls upon. Among them were a series of vivid head...
When he got back to California, he began to apply those lessons to his famous studies of nautilus shells and vegetables, using four-hour exposures to draw in every crevice and gleam of some resounding larger form. These pictures were a watershed for Weston. The pictorialists used soft focus for atmospheric purposes but also as a way to make the particular stand for the general. With these radiant close-ups, Weston kept their goal but reversed the approach, bearing down on the details as a new way to make the mundane suggest the divine. At first glance, the scientific exactness...