Edward Weston
gigatos | March 25, 2022
Summary
Edward Weston (Highland Park, March 24, 1886 – Carmel, January 1, 1958) was an American photographer, among the most important of the first half of the twentieth century.
He worked extensively in California and was invited to the Salon of Photography in London.
In 1920 Weston made a revision of his works, in which until then had prevailed the use of the flou effect, the artistic blur.
From 1923 to 1926 he worked in Mexico next to Tina Modotti, with whom he began a relationship, and made friends with some personalities of the Mexican Renaissance. This was a period in which he found himself and his stylistic path began to change. He was convinced that photography was about capturing life and in whatever form it presented itself, the only possible way to do so was through realism.
In 1932 together with other photographers, including Ansel Adams, founded the Group f
This group of photographers founded an aesthetic that was based on ””technical and stylistic perfection”: any photo that was not perfectly in focus or not perfectly printed or not mounted on white cardboard, was “impure”. It was a violent reaction to the corny and sentimental style that had made the pictorial photographers of California famous in those years.
The main aspect of Weston”s vision was his continual insistence that the photographer should already “visualize the picture within himself before he even takes it.”
In 1946 Edward Weston began to suffer from Parkinson”s disease and in 1948 he took his last photograph at Point Lobos.He died on January 1, 1958.
If we take a moment to think back and try to enter into what could have been the world of the artists who worked on the west coast of North America, in the period between the 1920s and the 1940s, we find a series of movements in slight conflict with each other, modernism, realism and pictorialism. It was in the midst of the latter movement that in New York E. Weston took his first steps into photography, beginning with door-to-door portraits.
He soon realizes that his ambition is another, and that he is not alone, with other photographers such as A. Stieglitz and P. Strand share a passion for nature as a subject, a nature in which purity and truth are sought, and the need to distance themselves from the society for which they feel nothing but contempt. So already in the early 20”s, completely abandoning the basis of pictorialism is inspired by the new environment that surrounds him, that of modernism, which reflects the influences of the European avant-garde, especially cubism, and his photographs are characterized by naturalness and simplicity, but above all by sharpness and precision.
So even if a bit against the grain E. Weston goes ahead with his style, trying to show the world his way of “seeing” things. With an almost maniacal care for the image, he tries to capture the timeless essence of the object, extracting a pure and perfect form in contrast to the background that surrounds it…and that sometimes is even more “real” than the object itself, ready to be reinterpreted. Using his own words “…with the utmost rigor; the stone is hard, the bark of a tree is harsh, the flesh is alive… “He defined himself as a “direct” photographer, in continuous search of the quintessence of the thing… He is capable of transforming the subjects photographed into pure visual metaphors of the elements of nature: the close-ups of shells, peppers, cabbages; the series of rocks and cypresses, photographed by abstracting them from the wild landscape of Point Lobos; the “incomplete” nudes, extremely sensual, embodying nothing but themselves; the studies of skies and clouds…. Even the America he represents is more raw and real than it was in reality, or at least than his fellow photographers had “told” until then. The eye that sees Weston”s America is extremely objective: desolate places, old cars, abandoned farms, muddy plains. Nothing comfortable or reassuring.
And it is perhaps for this reason that Edward Weston is so liked by Americans, finally a photographer who abandons the stereotype of photography as art.At that time many believed that photography was nothing more than a new class of painting and the attempt to create with the camera pictorial effects grew, creating a series of photographs and photographers very similar to each other; giving rise to a series of “photo-paintings” that had nothing to do with the naturalness of photography. And although the results were not related to Pictorialism, even those who were far from this type of photography, photographed a somewhat unreal America, or at least of an America that very little revealed the actual conditions.Even one of the masters of photography as Walker Evans photographed the state of degradation of America and became famous for his portraits to the lower classes of society. However, what makes Weston more sincere is perhaps the fact that in his landscapes or portraits there is no trace of “posing”.There are no eyes looking at the lens, no billboards, no clutter to distract the eye. His truth is made of lines, of shadows, of the white of black and all shades of gray.So Weston at the cost of appearing against the tide dedicated himself to his goal of making images that are so pure, true and simple, as to be accessible to anyone.Also because his being objective gave him not only originality, but also and above all sincerity. And if the images are the witnesses of the photographer”s own life, here we are talking about a humble, simple person, without the pretensions that artists normally have, and who perhaps a bit embodies the average American, a photographer as anyone could have been, a man whose sole purpose was an enormous desire to make known to his world what for him was the truth.
Ansel Adams was fond of saying, “Weston is one of the few creative artists of our time…. His works illuminate man”s spiritual journey toward perfection.”
Weston is the incarnation of poetry applied to photography, and his driving force is undoubtedly the continuous search to identify with nature in order to know it to its deepest essence. It is no coincidence that in 1941 he was asked by the publisher of Walter Whitman (1819 – 1892), one of the most important poets in American history, to illustrate the fourth edition of his book of poems “Leaves of grass”. Whitman”s poetry is characterized by the “invention” of free verse (totally contrary to current trends), which seemed to him the most direct means of being understood, to this is added the strong love and exaltation of the forces of nature. At least as much as the photos of Point Lobos where Weston tried to “photograph life”. The same passion for the purity of things, whether photographs or poems, both were true to the purity of “being”. Despite the fact that the two artists come from two different artistic currents in terms of period and style, there are several points of union between them. In both of them there is a trail of transcendentalism, which distinguishes their creations, wanting to define in this way the innate passion for describing their artistic inspirations in a way totally free from any constraint, but above all expressing feelings with absolute objectivity. The transcendentalist movement was characterized by a kind of “optimism”, which induced to grasp only the positive aspects of nature, where the only reality would be the transcendental one, the a priori form of every other reality.
As for Weston, especially in the years spent in Mexico (1922-27), where he focused on the relationship between “form and subject, realism and abstraction”, we can observe in his style, this note of transcendentalism; the continuous search for an image that is totally true, pure and free from any unnatural artifice leads him to make shots that although very different from each other, as a theme, they all have the same halo, the same force of impact … a reality that almost exceeds reality, W. demanded clarity of form, and the fact that the machine could see more than the human eye was like a miracle for him. W. demanded the clarity of form, and the fact that the machine could see more than the human eye was like a miracle for him. He himself tells us in his “day books” that “the machine must be used to record life” even if abstract, and there is no better means to record objectivity with total exactness. In this way the end result is an image so true, that it almost appears to us as a symbol of the image itself, but that again surprises us by appearing for what it is, but as if it were the first time we observed it. A kind of hyperrealism that reveals the vital essence of things.
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