Edward Weston "Weston's Westons Iconic and Rare Edward Weston Prints from the Cole Weston Trust"
Danziger Gallery
This event has ended.
Edward Weston was born in 1886 and died in 1958. He has long been regarded as one of the most important American photographers, one whose signature images - crisply focused renderings of organic subjects such as peppers, shells, sand dunes and abstract nudes are among the seminal Modernist works of the 20th century.
For most of his life, Weston meticulously made his own prints, noting on each negative envelope the various idiosyncrasies of each particular picture. However, as he got older and the effects of Parkinson's began to take a toll, he began to have his sons – first Brett and then Cole - print for him under his strict instruction.
Cole, an accomplished photographer himself, soon became the sole printer, printing for ten years under Edward's guidance and then continuing to make posthumous prints from 1958 until 1988 when he announced his plan to curtail his printing of Edward's negatives to concentrate on his own work. A provision in Edward Weston's will stipulated that no one else could make prints from those negatives –now all housed at The Center for Creative Photography in Tucson.
Cole Weston's prints – EW/CWs as they came to be known – were readily available to photography collectors in the 1970s and 1980s. But as the market for photography grew more pricey and rarefied and connoisseurs began to focus on the vintage print, EW/CWs came to be somewhat taken for granted. Today, however, it has become clear that not only are many of the EW/CW prints quite rare, but that there is a special validity to prints made by the great photographer's own son.
This exhibition posits a reconsideration of these prints. Selected from the Cole Weston Trust, the images are a mix of both iconic and unpublished. Together, they offer the chance to take a fresh look at the power of Edward Weston's work and the beauty of Cole's prints.
Focusing on Weston's obsession with sensuous form, the show gets to the heart of Weston's work and his passion. As Huntington Curator of Photographs Jennifer Watts has written: "Weston never cropped his photographs. He's really about finding the form in nature and honing in on that in a clear, concise, framed way."
Interestingly, while it has long been supposed that Weston's nudes came out of his interest in the abstract form of still lives, the dates of the earliest images show this to be the wrong way round. Weston's nudes of the early 1920s are shockingly bold and only later does he bring that vision to the peppers and shells.
The complexity of the photographic market – its varying editions, print types, and reproducibility - have taken some of the focus away from a simple enjoyment of the image. The genius of Edward Weston and the skilled and loving craft of his son's prints give us back the opportunity to appreciate both the images and the legacy of the special working relationship between father and son.
[Image: Edward Weston "Nude" (1920)]
Media
Schedule
from September 09, 2009 to October 24, 2009