Weston, Volume II, California

Weston's Daybooks are intermittently maintained journals that provide a unique opportunity to appreciate an artist's creative trajectory.  The judgements he makes about his own work tend toward the mystical. Tina Modotti commented in a letter to Weston on his mysticism and portrayed it to his approval as a strength. I think that if you want to evaluate Weston's impact as a photographer in his own time, it is more profitable to look at what the Daybooks reveal about his photographic techniques.

Weston began his career doing gauzy portraits in the 19th Century pictorialist tradition.  He and a few others then rebelled against that attempt to imitate painterly styles, choosing instead to use the capacity of large format photographic gear to yield images with a wide spectrum of tonalities and extreme resolution. The primary tool in producing such images was the smallest possible aperture behind the lens which yielded images with great depth of focus, making everything near or far in sharp focus.

What made Weston's images stand out from others in Group f.64 was the frequency with which he made frame-filling closeups of subjects which included vegetables, shells, bones, rocks and household utensils. Dark backgrounds removed any reference to the object's normal context and emphasized abstract patterns. Since Weston nearly always used only natural light for his compositions which were recorded with low-sensitivity films, his exposures were commonly 30 minutes in length and sometimes as long as three hours.  He even used these exposure and compositional techniques as far as was possible in making portraits.  He talks of hand holding his cumbersome medium format Graflex camera for sunlit portraits at a 1/10 of a second shutter speed.         

Weston did a lot of nudes, some full figure, others closeup with resemblances to his still life work. Those images seem to have been well received at the time and sold well. Weston devotes a lot of space in the Daybooks to his work with nudes and generally gives himself high marks for his efforts. I think a case can be made that he was objectifying his subjects and that this judgment is bolstered by his attitude toward the women in his life (many of whom started out as his models) with whom he could never seem to make a lasting and meaningful connection.

In regard to personal relationships Weston redeems himself to an extent in the second Daybooks volume with lengthy entries about his four sons.  Although Weston and his wife, Flora, lived apart for most of the time the boys were growing up, Weston maintained a close relationship with them all as they grew toward manhood. In a 2017 Lumiere Gallery interview Brett, Cole and Neil all spoke fondly of their father and his parenting efforts.

Thoughts about Weston's contemporaries in photography did not make their way into the Daybooks. He talks about painters, sculptors, dancers and musicians that he met over the years and shows no hesitancy in judging their competence. Imogen Cunningham and Roi Partridge were neighbors and friends.  Consuelo Kanaga took a selection of Weston's prints to New York to be seen by Stieglitz. Weston showed his work in a San Francisco gallery owned by Ansel Adams.  However, the work by those photo greats receives no attention in Weston's journal.

Weston refers briefly to an aspiration to have his writing recognized and published.  He did use excerpts from the Daybooks to go along with some of his exhibits, and his writing is easy to read. However, he never shows any real progress toward self knowledge in all the years he devoted to the Daybooks, and his awareness of the world outside his studio was skimpy at best.  Much of his career took place during the Great Depression, but he made only very fleeting references to it.  There was no indication of an awareness of Cartier-Bresson's observation that "The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks!".

The Daybooks saga ends with a note about meeting Charis Wilson, who managed to stick by Weston for over ten years.  For anyone wanting to understand Weston, the book by Charis is everything the Daybooks are not.

Portrait of Charis Wilson by Edward Weston, 1935

Reliability

 

For a recent visit to Phoenix I decided to take along my Olympus Infinity Stylus because of its pocketability and always-reliable performance.  I only took time to shoot a few frames on the roll of Arista 200 I had loaded in the camera.  Back home, I took a walk through Albuquerque's Old Town to finish off the roll.

The camera was made about thirty years ago and I've put over 50 rolls of film through it since I found it in a thrift store.  It has never missed a beat in all that time, and I may have only replaced the three-volt battery once, even though the auto-everything camera must draw quite a bit of power.

I found several examples of the Infinity Stylus in thrift stores over the years and never paid more than ten dollars for them.  I was initially incredulous when I saw them going not long ago on ebay for well over $100.  On giving some thought to the issue, however, I'm thinking now that the combination of quality output and never-say-die reliability makes the current prices quite understandable.

I only got around to using the Olympus Infinity Stylus once in 2024.  I'll try to pay more attention to the little jewel this year.

At One (point five)

 

Weston, Volume I. Mexico

 I got talking recently with a friend about The Daybooks of Edward Weston. I said it had been a long time since I read Weston in his own words and I resolved to read him anew.  When I turned open the cover I found that my copy was a gift from friends in 1978! It was not surprising then that much of what I read this time around seemed completely new to me.

 

I enjoyed re-reading about Weston's first year in Mexico where he was accompanied by his young son, Chandler, and Tina Modotti.  Much of that narrative is focused on the process of getting to know the extraordinary group of artists who had assembled in Mexico City while the country was still in a very turbulent state following the 1910 Revolution.  Some in the community of artists such as the muralist, Diego Rivera, identified with the aspirations of the Revolution, but all were fundamentally dependent on the patronage of the moneyed class which found a mostly comfortable refuge in the country's capital city.  Weston made a living there primarily by making portraits of upper class Mexicans.

Weston devotes quite a bit of space in his Daybooks to discussing his development as an artist/photographer and he also provides some interesting details about his photographic techniques.  Though best known for his large format work he actually made a lot of pictures in Mexico using a 3-1/4 x 4-1/4 Graflex.  Weston had an enlarger of some sort, however he used it not to make prints directly from those Graflex negatives, but rather to produce enlargements on glass plates which could then be used to make contact prints on 8x10 paper.

 The last chapters of the Daybooks reminded me of why -- in spite of my regard for Weston's accomplishments as a photographer -- I have such a thorough dislike of him.  Although there are abundant indications of his character throughout the Daybooks, they are somewhat easy to overlook amidst his enthusiastic accounts of his artistic trajectory.  He was in the end a serial exploiter of all of the women who were close to him, even including the young servants in his Mexican household.  You have to wonder what were the thoughts of the Daybooks editor, Nancy Newhall, as she assembled those final damning chapters.

Bumps in the Road

 My Nikon FE has made some good pictures for me, but I haven't made a lot of use of it.  I decided to rectify that neglect with a trip to the zoo on a fine morning.  I made all the shots there with the Vivitar 3.5/70-210mm macro zoom.

  I grabbed a quick still life the next morning and then took a walk in Old Town with the Nikkor -P Auto 2.5/105mm.

When I got to Old Town I found that the meter's batteries had died, so I switched to manual exposure to finish off the roll of Fuji Neopan 400.  Back home, I processed the film in HC110b.  About a third of the zoo shots were blank frames.

The short series of shots from Old Town were ok, so I'm hoping the dying batteries accounted for the missing zoo shots.  I'll shoot another roll of the Neopan 400 to test that theory, and maybe also try developing in PMK to comapare with the HC110 results.

Old Town

 I have been walking around Old Town with my cameras since we moved to Albuquerque about sixteen years ago.  A lot of little shops have come and gone in that time, but the character of the place has largely endured.

Spare Parts

 In one week I managed to break the plastic rewind cranks on two old cameras that I like, the Nikon EM and my two-decade-old Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim.  Luckily for me I had a spare crank for the VUWS, and the Nikon EM was put back in working order thanks to the generosity of a friend.

So, time to test the repairs.  I headed over to the Los Poblanos fields to see if I could find some wintering Sandhill Cranes.  Thee were plenty of birds, but none were willing to allow me close enough for a picture.  I had to settle for a shot of an old cottonwood which showed no objection to being photographed.

Nikon EM

The next day I took  both cameras to the Tingley ponds. The little Ultra Wide was loaded with Kendtmere 100.  In the Nikon EM I had a roll of slightly expired Fuji Neopan Presto which Jim Grey sent me some time ago, 

I had walked around one of the ponds with the Vivitar 70-210 Macro Zoom on the Nikon EM.  That gave me more than enough reach to shoot the lounging ducks and geese.  Back at my starting point I rewarded my subjects with a single slice of bread which caused quite a lot of excitement.  There is a sign at the pool's edge requesting that people not feed the birds, but I figured my small transgression would not be noticed.

Shortly afterward this woman arrived in an suv and distributed about forty pounds of bird food to the ducks and geese.  She told me she did this daily!  I captured the scene with the Ultra Wide.

With two rolls of film to process I decided to do them together with semi-stand development in highly diluted HC110, following the technique developed by hjlphotos.  That turned out well with the Fuji Neopan 400.  The Kentmere 100 from the Ultra Wide did not like that choice however, and I had to resort to some careful photoshopping to get something acceptable.