Word: westons
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About 1930, however, led by two men who are among the greatest photographers that America has ever produced, Edward Weston and Walker Evans, photographers turned en masse from pictorialism, began to relish the sharpness of a focussed photographic image, and became less formalistic in their work. By not understanding these men, or any that followed them, Robert Doty has essentially presented us not with the major retrospective of the 1970s which he intended, but with a history of photography that stops in 1930. Instead of advancing the history of the medium ten years, he has taken it back fifty...
...shock or "tell us something" are inherently weak; the photographic sensibility is at its height when it picks out the realities which are known to be significant to our lives and gives them coherent visual expression. This "Flame of Recognition," to use Nancy Newhall's description of Edward Weston, is what lies behind any great photographer. The absence of Friedlander, Winogrand and their co-workers from the Whitney's show is emblematic of Doty's failure to comprehend this, but his miscomprehension of what makes for good photography also shows up in his failure to hang the best photographs...
...this particular show is not an exception. There is a wonderful chance at the Whitney to see photographs and photographers which are not well-known, if for the moment you ignore that almost all of them deserve to be obscure. Among the better examples are several photographs by Edward Weston from his very early pictorial period. These are quite rare--largely because later in his life he so disliked the pictures that he destroyed the negatives--but quite interesting to someone who knows mostly Weston's other work...
American museums, especially, have been interested in the "more imaginative" masters of the medium, beginning with Edward Steichen, proceeding through the epic or intimist nature poets (Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Ansel Adams) and finishing in an exponential growth of different styles in the '70s -Duane Michals' enigmatic fumetti, Paul Caponigro's monumental landscapes, and Jerry Uelsmann's surrealist montages. Meanwhile, LIFE and Look were the showcases for the documentary photographs: the picture magazines were their museum without walls, and it is now pitifully shrunk. To present the documentary photographer to a "serious" audience, an audacious venture...
Died. Anne Sexton, 45, suburban housewife who turned to poetry during a nervous breakdown 18 years ago and proceeded to write seven books of searingly personal verse, including the Pulitzer-prizewinning Live or Die (1966); apparently by her own hand (carbon-monoxide inhalation); in Weston, Mass. Clearly intrigued in her poems by the thought of her own death, Sexton survived a number of suicide attempts. After the 1963 suicide of Fellow Poet Sylvia Plath, Sexton recalled discussions the two had had in the late 1950s: "We talked about death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawing to it like...