by Susan Danly, Jonathan Spaulding, Jessica Todd Smith and Jennifer A. Watts
Edward Weston, just like his friend and Group f/64 colleague Ansel Adams, is one of the titans of 20th century photography. While Adams concentrated on landscape, Weston was prodigiously versatile artist, and this book is a witness to it.
I bought it some 17 years ago but never bothered to read about a hundred pages of text preceding the plate section. (I leafed through them at the time to look at the photos, of course.) In the meantime, the book travelled with us from England to Fuerteventura — where, perhaps as a homage to Weston’s dunes, it accumulated between the pages a bit of sand from “our” own dunes — and then to Las Palmas. It would remain unexplored for some years more if not for our little art project.
A few weeks ago, I was looking for a good background for a symbol and the black cloth cover of this book did fit the bill. Once we finished with photography, I sat down to read...
(And when I was not reading, I was using it to press down the scanner’s lid.)
The formerly overlooked part includes:
- Life-Work: Edward Weston’s Guggenheim Gift (Jennifer A. Watts)
- Bright Power, Dark Peace: Edward Weston’s California (Jonathan Spaulding)
- “Literally Photographed”: Edward Weston and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (Susan Danly)
- Time of Exposure: Nancy Newhall’s Unpublished Book of Edward Weston’s Nudes (Jessica Todd Smith)
Of the four essays, I found the last one most intriguing, as well as the best written. It beggars belief that in 1950s America one could not find a publishing house that was up to the task.
In addition to the issue of taste, the subject of the nude raised legal concerns. Clearly Weston was aware of the practical problems his photographs of nudes could cause. When sending prints back and forth, he took care to specify that they should be shipped “express” rather than through the regular mail, “otherwise we might be looking for trouble”.
What trouble? A footnote says:
In 1930, a tariff act was passed that forbade the import into the United States of obscene pictures, drawings, prints, or nude figures on paper and other materials. The customs and postal authorities were authorized to destroy any such articles if they were not of great financial value.
Come to think about it, it does not beggar any belief. The Land of the Free did not change that much since 1930s. And it was not until 2007 (that is, till after A Legacy) that Weston and Newhall’s Book of Nudes was finally published in its intended form.
The “main part” contains 143 gorgeous plates faithfully reproducing the original 7½″ × 9½″ gelatin silver prints. The photos were selected and printed in the 1940s by Weston himself for the Huntington Library. Still life, abstracts, landscapes, cityscapes (including those of ghost towns), industrial photography, studio sets and portraits — with nudes conspicuous by their absence.
 |
| Shell, Glendale (1927) |
 |
| Point Lobos, 1929 |
 |
| Boat Builder, Wilmington, 1935 |
 |
| Dunes, Oceano, 1936 |
 |
| Nude on Sand, Oceano, 1936 |
 |
| Charis, Lake Ediza, 1937 |
 |
| Potato Cellar, Lake Tahoe, 1937 |
 |
| Juniper, Sierra Nevada, 1937 |
 |
| Tomato Field, Monterey Coast, 1937 |
 |
| Death Valley, 1938 |
 |
| Crescent Beach, North Coast, 1939 |
 |
| Boulder Dam, 1941 |
 |
| Belle Grove, Louisiana, 1941 |
 |
| Chimayo, New Mexico, 1942 |
No comments:
Post a Comment