From: Carl Weese (cweese@earthlink.net)
Date: 08/18/02-09:43:10 AM Z
Shannon,
There is a technical point that neither the films nor papers Weston used are
available today. But it's really all in the way he used them. Weston found a
technique that perfectly expressed his vision, even as that vision changed
during his career. It wasn't the way he printed, or the way he exposed the
film, but the whole shebang. I think he had the ability to do the whole
process--from the decision to think about making a picture today, to the
final print--seamlessly. I'll wager that he often had a good idea what the
burning/dodging map was going to look like before exposing the negative.
There's a strong tendency among photographers to approach the print and the
photograph as two different things. I think Weston avoided this, with
wonderful results. He was self concious about it, btw, intentionally
simplifying his approach, winding up using only an 8x10 camera and contact
printing under a plain light bulb. (Shannon you certainly can do the same
with modern silver paper, using a very weak bulb 7.5 or 15 watt bulb. Weston
used slow contact speed papers and much brighter bulbs) If he'd had to use
different materials he'd have found a way to make them deliver.
Weston's work has suffered from having a few iconic images reproduced over
and over again making his work seem more limited than it was. The nude that
so upsets Judy is a good example of this. It's been reproduced ad nauseum,
but one reason it got that status is that of the eight or nine pictures in
the series, it's the only one that *could* be reproduced for many years
because the others all showed pubic hair, which back in those days meant
they could not legally be sent through the U.S. mail, and few galleries
would risk showing them. (See the fascinating book-length memoir by Charis
Wilson for a discussion of this and other sessions for which she was the
model, and a lot of refreshing myth-debunking.) That one picture has been
reproduced endlessly, but in fact it isn't at all representative of his
photographs of women. No single Weston image is representative of Weston's
work--that's kind of the point. That was probably evident in the show you
saw, as it is in the several books of Weston's work, though it makes an
enormous difference to see the prints instead of the books.
It's amazing how many incorrect myths surround Weston. That he was a
doctrinaire, concept-driven artist, that he can be defined by "the group
f.64" theories, that he used the Zone System, that he was "an austere
sensualist" (would someone please tell me what in the world Jed Pearl can
mean by that?) Who cares whether an artist is labeled modernist, or
post-post, or anything else by a yammering critic. Weston made fabulous
pictures, and they're worth looking at.
---Carl
--
web site with picture galleries
and workshop information at:
http://home.earthlink.net/~cweese/
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