From: Shannon Stoney (shannonstoney@earthlink.net)
Date: 08/17/02-09:16:34 PM Z
I saw the Weston show today in Chattanooga, and it brought up some questions
for me about why we do what we do. I mean, if somebody could make a silver
gelatin photograph that is that beautiful, why look anywhere else for an
emulsion? These were as beautiful as any platinum prints that I have ever
seen . Not that I've seen a huge number of platinum prints, but I've seen
some really good ones, like some by Kenro Izu, and there were some by Weston
himself in this show. The platinum prints in this show were sort of sepia
colored, unlike the more modern ones I've seen, and that's another question
the show brought up: do they age to that color, or did Weston just use an
emulsion or developer that made them look that way?
Of course most gelatin silver prints are not as beautifully printed as
Weston's. Which raises the question: how did he do it? Besides being
totally obsessive, I mean. I know that he used a pyro developer, but were
there any other crucial things? There was a good video where various sons
and lovers talked about Weston, and there was a picture of his darkroom, a
very small and primitive affair, with apparently only a lightbulb for a
light source. Or am I mistaken? Somebody on the video said that the paper
available in Weston's time was different, so that Brett and Cole's later
prints from his negatives couldn't look the same as the prints from the 30s
even if they printed exactly to his specifications.
If anybody knows of a good book about Weston, I'd like to know about it.
I've read some of the daybooks, although not every word.
The other, perhaps unanswerable, question the show brought up was: why do
some academic types diss this kind of work? I mean the super formalist,
super fine-print, f64 mentality? It seems that for a while--that is, the
70s through the 90s--it's almost been politically incorrect to make that
kind of work. I kind of understand that theoretically--that is, the
rejection of modernism as too other-worldly--but it's hard to understand it
when you're standing in front of the most beautiful, sensual prints you've
ever seen in your life. Maybe you can only reject that kind of work when
you've only seen it in reproduction, or at least, you haven't seen it in
person recently and you've sort of forgotten the effect it has on you.
Anyway, I don't think this was the same show that Jed Perl reviewed, because
the one he saw was "Edward Weston: The Last Years in Carmel," and the show
I saw was a retrospective of Weston's whole life. Perl does say that Weston
is enjoying something of a renaissance. He writes:
"There is something to be said about the prominence of Weston,
a tough-minded West Coast aesthete, in the age of the blockbuster show.
This artist who believed that a piece of driftwood could be more beautiful
than the Venus de Milo has emerged as a hero for the fashion-and-design
crowd that has cashed in on a growing taste for minimalist Americana, and
perhaps Weston's new admirers are not incorrect to think that he was, in his
own way, a materialist. Weston's photographs might be said to describe
precisely the bleached decor that you need if you are setting up a certain
kind of ivory tower."
Is there really such a growing taste for minimalism and a kind of New
Formalism, or shall we call it New Modernism (seemingly a redundancy) afoot?
(Or shall we call it postpostmodernism?) Not knowing anybody in the
fashion-and-design crowd, I couldn't say. If this is true, though, it seems
like a good thing that people no longer feel guilty, as they were made to
feel in the seventies and even into the nineties, for enjoying purely
aesthetic, even formalist, pleasures.
--shannon
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