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.