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

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.

The signal and the noise

I just read Nate Silver's book, The Signal and the Noise, so of course that allows me to steal his title. I'm not going to actually say anything much about the book except to note the phenomenon under examination is evident in the book's reception and reviews. I'm amused that the Republican pundits accused Silver of a liberal bias because he was predicting an Obama win. Given his faultless performance in both the national and state races, Silver is obviously a competent number cruncher; he also seems to me to be a pretty much standard-issue libertarian geek of the type one finds hanging out at Slashdot.

The signal to noise ratio is something we all must deal with constantly in all of life's aspects, but it's seeming more overwhelming the last couple decades due to the rise of computing and the internet. One sees the problem expressed very often in regard to photo history and criticism as bad ideas, bad history and bad analysis get propagated and reproduced at the speed of light. Of course, the origins of the problem are pre-computer age, but the exponential propagation takes us into new territory.

I got to thinking about this topic recently when I was writing about Edward Weston's life and work. I googled "f.64" which was the name of a group organized originally in 1932 to promote a photo exhibit of a half-dozen proponents of straight photography which included Weston. I was dismayed to see that the Wikipedia reference on the subject was a hopeless misrepresentation of history. The comparison with the earlier tradition of pictorialism was muddled by confusion over terminology, and the positions of predecessors and pioneers like Stieglitz was completely misrepresented. The so-called f.64 manifesto was featured as if it represented something other than exhibition hyperbole.
 i.e.:
"..Pure photography is defined as possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form..."

 I think Willard Van Dyke may have penned that; it has to be rated as one of the silliest things said at any place or time about photography. Ansel Adams, a smart member of the group, amended the statement to the point of refutation later, but that has not prevented it from being propagated ad nauseum.

 Weston wrote quite a lot about photography and much of that is well worth reading, but he had his blind spots as well, particularly as related to his own work, and those too have clogged both the analogue and digital channels of photography's history. For instance, Weston often referred to the reality and "thingness" of his subjects, but much of his most lauded work with nudes, nature and still life consists of abstract representations. Janet Malcolm laid out the issues around these conflicts between stated intent and execution in a review of a Weston retrospective which took place in New York in 1975:

 "The sight of these strange, strong compositions casts doubt on another accepted idea about Weston. This is his presumed role in the history of photography as a prime mover in the revolution that over-threw the "pictorial" approach of the Photo-Secession and established "straight" photography as the medium's legitimate mode. In actuality, what Weston did (as Paul Strand and Man Ray had already begun to do) was simply to bring pictorialism up to date: to replace the Impressionist, Symbolist, and Pre-Raphaelite models of the Photo Secession with those of Cubist, Futurist, Dadaist, Purist, and Surrealist art. Straight photography -- whatever it is -- is hardly exemplified by peppers like clenched fists...,thighs like shells, shells like vulvas, cloud formations like elongated torsos.., palm trunks like industrial smokestacks -- forms that Weston saw because he had seen modern art...
...The technical innovations of straight photography that were erected into a kind of religion by its practitioners -- the change from soft-focus to sharp lenses, from manipulated to unretouched prints, from warm and soft to cold and glossy printing paper -- were, again, changes dictated by the appearance of modern art rather than by the claims of "reality." Optical sharpness, after all, is more an attribute of the buzzard's than of the human eye; Stieglitz's blurry view of the thin Flatiron Building on a snowy day is surely a more literal rendering of "the thing itself" than Weston's razor-sharp close-up of a halved artichoke."

Weston 2.0

I thought Beth Gates Warren did a good job of recovering much of the substance of Edward Weston's early career which he had meticulously obscured. I think the limitations in her account of the period can mostly be attributed to the fact that she was trying to not go too far beyond her sources. I would guess the Weston family would not agree and would not be fans of Warren's book, though she was in my opinion overly generous in her assessment of Weston's work in his Los Angeles years. Warren's approach to critiquing the pictures from that period is primarily descriptive with interpretation mainly focusing on Weston's intentions for his compositions. She does, of course, report Weston's final self-assessment of that period in which he stated that he had lied to himself about the value of his work in the early period.

 The book is as much about Margrethe Mather and her personal and artistic relationship to Weston as it is about Weston and his evolution as an artist. Warren presents as good a picture of the enigmatic Mather as possible given the available records, except that I think a more critical aesthetic analysis would have been helpful in sorting out how Mather and Weston influenced each other. Looking at their pictures side by side when both were working primarily in the gauzy pictorialist style, Mather seems to me as good if not better than Weston in many instances, particularly in regard to the portraits. Mather's portraits show a real connection to the personalities she photographed while Weston's from that period often seem like caricatures.

 The works that Weston at the time portrayed as avant garde usually involved unconventional compositional balance in a manner which may have been more Mather's creation than his own. Ironically, he presented his work at that time as quintessentially photographic though it was obviously grounded in 19th Century painterly values. The cover photo on Warren's book looks back even further to the stylistic preference of the period for Japanese woodblock prints. The message those pictures by Weston mainly convey is one of conflicted intentions.

 While there was some aesthetic parity evident between the two artists, Mather's work doesn't seem characterized by internal conflict. She clearly didn't share Weston's level of ambition, and it seems her identity was not wholly tied to her art as was the case with Weston. While still together with Weston she seemed content to remain in the soft-focus mode when many of her peers in the wider world were moving toward the Straight Photography model. A good example of this is the work entitled "Water Lily" from 1922 which is transparently derivative from Baron Adolf De Meyer's still life compositions from 1908. It seems odd that Warren chose to include the picture in her book without commenting on that connection and its significance. Later, Mather moved away from the soft-focus style. She did a compelling series of close-up patterns of shells, cigarettes and other man-made and natural objects. Her pictures of hands and feet are evocative of the work of Stieglitz and a flower shot suggests the influence of Imogen Cunningham.

Given the history Warren presents of Weston, Mather and their circle of friends it doesn't seem surprising that Weston made the leap he did into a new life and a new photographic style, except for the fact that he was 37 years old at the time.  It does seem extraordinary that he was able to successfully recreate his career as an artist at that point, though not with the rapidity that he probably first imagined.    He did some exceedingly nice work in Mexico, but achieved little real immediate financial or critical success.  That would come much more gradually as he abandoned Modotti and the Mexican adventure and returned to California, ultimately hooking up with Charis Wilson when she was barely out of high school .  Charis' indefatigable support was clearly a key element in the arc of Weston's culminating accomplishment.  Of course when Charis demanded some public recognition of her creative contributions, that was more than Weston's ego could sustain and so she had to go too.

Personalities in Photography

I am midway through yet another book about Edward Weston, Artful Lives, by Beth Gates Warren.  It is a rather rambling account of his early, formative professional period around the time of the First World War.  Some of the same ground is covered in Weston's memoirs and in the book by Charis Wilson, but Warren's account provides some of the missing links needed to explain Weston, who went to considerable lengths to expunge crucial details of his early professional and personal life.

The thing that seems the most difficult to understand about Weston is his capacity to attract the affections of a string of extraordinary women coupled with an inability to to sustain a commitment to those relationships.  It appears that Weston learned a lot about life and photography from what he described as his first significant relationship with Margrethe Mather.  Weston then went on to teach photography to Tina Modotti who accompanied him in his fruitful developing years in Mexico.  Finally, he consolidated his photographic style  and his reputation as an artist with the assistance of Charis Wilson who was his model as well as an extraordinary writer, editor and publicist.  All of these relationships ended in shipwrecks on the shoals of Weston's egotistical competitiveness.

The subtitle of Warren's book provides an important clue to an analysis of Weston's life and personality: ...Edward Weston, Margrethe Mather, and the Bohemians of Los Angeles.  What that is pointing to is the fact that, while Weston nurtured a public image of domestic rectitude, his circle of friends was made up of a cast of characters for whom social non-conformity was the norm.  They were politically radical, promiscuous, assertive, and often very talented as artists, performers and writers.  A personality profile which seems a good fit with many of them can be found in some well-publicized recent psychology studies which focused on the attitudes and character traits of porn actors.

Of course, any discussion of porn actors is going to place a primary emphasis on sexuality, or more exactly sociosexuality which refers to a person's willingness to engage in sexual relations outside of a committed relationship.  However, there is a constellation of traits which accompany sociosexuality that is relevant to both the porn actor group and the early-Twentieth-Century cohort of Los Angeles Bohemians.

In a Psychology Today blog article, Scott McGreal says:

"A number of studies have also linked high sociosexuality and having a large number of sexual partners to certain antisocial traits in both men and women.  For example, people high in sociosexuality tend to rate themselves lower in the traits of honesty, humility, and agreeableness... Additionally, sociosexuality has also been linked to a group of traits known collectively as the "dark triad", namely psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism... Briefly, psychopathy refers to willingness to violate the rights of others, Machiavellianism to willingness to manipulate and use others, and narcissism to an inflated sense of one's own importance and superiority."

McGreal goes on to point out that the picture is not so black as it initially looks as there is actually a range of interpersonal warmth exhibited by the groups being examined which attenuates the antisocial aspects of the personality profile subsumed by sociosexulity.  It is not clear where Weston was to be found on the continuum of warmth, but he does seem to have had a talent for selecting partners who were at the warm end of the scale.

The psychological studies do not make a link to artistic creativity, though they may point to the propensity for self-promotion which is certainly a useful skill for people wanting to make a living from their art.  There is also another mystery in regard to Weston, which is how he made the leap from being a skillful hack to a sublime artist with the camera.  Perhaps I'll find some clues to solving that mystery from the second half of Warren's book.