Edward Weston:
When I first looked at reproductions of Edward Weston’s prints almost 30 years ago, I found them inert and dull, skillful but lifeless. And I figured that since Weston himself had published these black-and-white photos in books, I’d given them an adequate viewing.
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Subtleties of texture and tone are the first thing that set the prints apart. The luminous, airy sea foam in one Surf, Point Lobos, 1938 (different images often have the same title) isn’t nearly as spectacular as the liquid-smooth rock surfaces–though dark, they seem to glow with an inner light. In Sea, Point Lobos, 1940, dark specks of floating kelp have an unaccountable weight and power, disrupting the reflective surface of the Pacific. In Granite Cliff, Point Lobos, 1944, cracks in the cliff register as deep cavities–secret hiding places or passageways into some other world. Yet despite such contrasts, the prints always present a balanced, harmonious whole.
But I can’t see the Point Lobos pictures as autobiographical. To do so seems reductive–and even Travis notes that Weston himself tended to reject psychological interpretations of his work. While a cracked rock face might recall wrinkles, and thus mortality, the problem with such readings (expressed in wall labels with less subtlety than in the catalog) is that they leave out so much. Pictures of dead pelicans might reflect on human mortality, but the vivid, dynamic way Weston frames the corpse in Dead Pelican, Point Lobos, 1942–with wings spread and beak pointing straight up–makes the creature look ready to spring back to life. Resurrection, or at least the idea of nature’s cycles, seems as much a subject as death.
Weston’s stated interest in capturing “universal rhythms” is evident in Floating Driftwood, 1945, which juxtaposes two similarly curved pieces of wood, one a rough, broad piece floating and the other thinner, smoother, and sitting on a rock marked with multiple curved lines. It’s as if a hidden order, a universal dictionary of forms, had suddenly revealed a few of its entries. In Dead Pelican, Point Lobos, 1945, the bird’s curves are echoed by long reeds that float on the water beside it; rocks visible underwater, some rounded, add another layer of texture.
