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.
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| Portrait of Charis Wilson by Edward Weston, 1935 |
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