From: Bob and Carla (bb333@earthlink.net)
Date: 08/17/02-10:12:08 PM Z
Brava Shannon!
What a perceptive, objectively considered and eloquently
written letter! Good questions and thoughts. Weston, was if anything,
a purist. He loved photography as a tool for personal expession, but
he was also an artist and a craftsman. He loved printmaking as part of
the photographic statement. I think that this kind of printmaker
tends to make prints that are elevating, whether they use silver,
ferrics, albumen, or whatever. EW used pre-coated platinum paper,
similar to Suras at North American Platinotype, but it was the
discontinuation of that factory-ready paper that helped move him to
the silver-gelatin, factory-made papers. But also, as a photographer
and a printmaker, he was also in the middle of a move from the
Photo-secessionist/pictorialist approach toward the so-called, f/64 charter.
I don't think there is a question of should I use either/or.....
For my own preferences hand-coated, ferric-salts emulsions and
silver-gelation printmaking are both important to me, if I can make a
print of the photograph in question, elevating. There is another
museum-grade issue with the archival difference between PT/PD and
silver-gelatin...the noble metals do have the upper-hand in material
nobility. I have explored less than many that attend this list, but I
may experience other processes too as I gain proficiency in what I am
working with now, but for myself, it has to grow with my vision.
There has been a distinct prejudice for decades now, between
the East coast/West coast schools, with much of accademia embracing
the eastern version because of the Street School vs. Idyllic Nature
school, which for my money translates more into, "experimantation vs.
mastery" orientaion. Everyone, please excuse me if I over-simplify or
misrepresent anything... Shannon, your letter was just very
interesting, amd I wanted to put my two cents worth in.
I wouldn't say, "post-post-modernism".......it's still just
modernism. I like EW's own statement as a pure reference to modernism,
"if I want to photograph a rock, I want the photograph to faithfully
represent the rock.....but I want it [the photograph] to be more than
a rock", which shows a subliminal and subjective references which I
think could be classified as both Modern and Postmodern. But if you
use one of the distinctions of Postmodernism that I cite, "the process
is part of the statement", that the essence of the photographic
process is evident in the style, whether it is an optical distinction,
film borders, a reflection/shadow of the photographer, or in the words
of a group f/64 member, "the transcendence of the simple statement of
the lens...." I would include members of this group in the earliest
efforts also of postmodernism, which puts them at a leading edge in America.
I think that he rolled liberally in the material essences of the
world that he lived in...but yearned for the spiritual essences, or
"what ELSE things were"....where what he was viewing on the
ground-glass made him feel JS Bach...and what a great tool
photography is for that!
Shannon, I'm glad that you saw the show and gained so much from it!
Robert
Shannon Stoney wrote:
>
> 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
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : 09/19/02-11:02:49 AM Z CST