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.