Born March 24 1886 Chicago, Illinois. Completed 6 month course at Illinois college of Photography. By 1911 had set up his own Portrait business in Los Angeles.
1922- Travelled to Ohio to see his sister as part of a larger trip which was to meet Alfred Stieglitz. It was at this time that he made 6 (approx.) prints of the Armco Steel mill. This was a pivotal point in his photography. Never before had he produced anything like this. He was showing Industry’s hard concrete artless buildings in an artistic light, balancing expanses of featureless wall with delicate cable wire. Vertical stacks paling into the background whilst flowing curves of steel ducting juxtapose the foreground. Before setting off back home he wrote in his diary that the artist must respond to the architecture of the age, good or bad showing it in new & fascinating ways. This shows that Weston was at the forefront of a movement that was looking to show the new culture of industry & skyscrapers in a new & artistic way. Almost overnight Weston had transformed himself into a Modernist. His clarity of mind is proven with his approach to the Armco series. The harsh & straight lines created by the edges, corners & resulting shadows had to be pin sharp & the correct angles at which to take the photo’s had to be sought out. Without this attention to detail the strength of the image is lost entirely. His approach was clinical & precise, & was the only way it could be if he was to convey this sterile environment in an artistic way.
“Form follows function”.
portraits His “Heroic” mode.- Camera looks slightly up at model, with full frame of sky as a backdrop.
EW’s Toilet photo.- Following the maxim “Form follows function” he struggled for more than a week to properly photograph the toilet. He called it a “glossy enamelled receptacle of extraordinary beauty”. His mission was to depict the object in such a way that people saw it with an “absolute aesthetic response to form”. If people looked at it & their response was to laugh or make crude jokes then he would have failed in his attempts to show this in such a way as to convey solely an aesthetic beauty.
Nudes.- Weston seemed to be at his freest & most creative when photographing nude models. He used to have the models dance for him. In this way he was forced to become intuitive and ultimately capture the fluid lines & infinite combinations of form that the moving body throws up. He wrote “Trying to record ever-changing movement and expression, everything depends on my clear vision, my intuition at the important moment, which if lost can never be repeated.”
Form.- Although portraits & nudes were the mainstay of his photographic career, he also used shells, fruit & vegetables. The nudes & portraits would be something that he would do throughout his life. I think that by just having the knowledge that they were always there to fall back on was a massive comfort to him which few people seem to pick up on. By always having a safe haven close by as it were, one is more able to experiment & express much more freely, and in doing so push personal and professional boundaries. I think this is true to say of most people.
Landscape.- It wasn’t until he moved to Carmel (Northern California) that he tackled ‘full on’ landscapes. Carmel is a perfectly situated for so many things. Within a couple of hours he was able to capture images in Yosemite National Park, Death Valley & Central Valley. This, coupled with the whole of the North Californian coastline is enough to provide a photographer with a lifetimes work, he was in his element & at his most creative. His first efforts were at nearby Big Sur, where he was surrounded by things on a scale he hadn’t really tackled before, Giant Californian Redwoods & huge mountains that came right down to the shoreline. The sheer scale of things overwhelmed him & it took a few months for him to get the measure of the place. He saw this new-found scale as “a thing of emotional mood, rather than a revelation of essentials.”
Always looking to improve his images, he made the decision in 1930 to move to a truly glossy paper. In doing so he would have eventually have to reprint his entire portfolio, but this did not daunt him as it would be worth it, being as it was a step in the right direction to attain as he called it “photographic beauty”. His aim was simple; To provide an unclouded image of rhythm, form & perfect detail for people to view & judge his work by. I’m going to try to use this, for a while, as my mantra in an attempt to distil my own work.
It was in this same year that his professional life really took off. He had his first solo exhibition in New York, which was promptly followed by a whole host more across the length & breadth of the States.
In 1934/5 Weston met, fell in love with & eventually married the beautiful Charis Wilson. The dynamics of their relationship were different to all of his previous loves in so far as to say that Charis was not a photographer. Yet it was them working together, he as photographer & her as model, that gave Weston his next big break. They had moved to Santa Monica in 1935, where Weston, clearly inspired by his love for her, & her body, took many photographs of her, both in the studio & on location. The location was the beach & dunes of Oceano, a short drive from Santa Monica. These images of her are so much more free & informal, less stiff & posed, than anything that had gone before. It seems to me that here was a phase of transition. Prior to this period of work, all of his nudes had been solely about form, but in this time period i see much more than that. It is clear to me that these images border on eroticism, but always staying on the right side of decency. This i feel is because he does not compromise form, structure or composition in any way, yet she is free to move as she wants with him offering minimal guidance. This harps back to his earlier nude work, when they used to dance before him. The difference being that what he saw then was objects, not things of beauty & sensuality. Whilst there his eye was caught by the dunes themselves & the way the sun’s rays created light & shadows in rhythms, rather like the dancers he photographed earlier in his life.
His marriage to Charis last ten years, during which his photographic artistry was at its best. Somewhere in that period of time he reached his zenith. His divorce from Charis, coupled with the onset of Parkinson’s Disease really marked the end of an era, or at least the beginning of the end of Weston as a leading light.
In 1947 he dabbled with colour photography, which he quite enjoyed, revisiting old haunts & recreating portraits he had taken before. The following eleven years leading to his death on New Years Day 1958 have precious little to show relating to his love of photography.
Ansel Adams said a frequent comment of his was “Well, if it means that to him it’s all right with me.” He suffered no sense of personal insecurity in his work.
He never verbalised his own work. Which is fantastic for the common man, who can look at the image & take/read what he wants into it therefore each individual can walk away satisfied with their own conclusion, having ‘achieved a reading’ of a piece of art, without it being spelt out. The down side to this is that we are force-fed a load of claptrap by so-called experts on the matter in hand. The truth of the matter is that unless said exert has actually met & discussed particular images with EW, then they are only interpreting using the same tools & knowledge as the layman the are preaching to.
I see! 