After Weston
Attempting to imitate the “eye” of one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century
An image from Ken McElrath’s After Weston series. © Ken McElrath. All rights reserved.
After 1927, Edward Weston returned to California from Mexico and embarked on a photographic journey heavily influenced by Modernist ideas. Under the influence of major artists such as Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, Constantin Brancusi and others, Weston's work incorporated abstraction into still life compositions of natural objects such as shells, vegetables, seaweed, Cyprus trees, rocks and other local scenery. In doing so, he transformed his subject matter into timeless images that captured a reality beyond the merely superficial, and he became one of the central figures in American Modernism.
Weston was profoundly affected by place. In addition to being a voracious observer and absorber of contemporary trends in music, painting and sculpture, his choice of where to live and work was critical to the images he produced. Much of his work during the late 1920s and 1930s was done in Carmel, California, which at the time was a rather small, bohemian, yet, somewhat artistically backward seaside community. But he was glad to be away from the cities and instead surrounded by nature. When he traveled, he preferred the rural areas to the cities, and his work bears testament to this, with photos from the Mojave Desert, Death Valley, rural Arizona and the far reaches of Utah.
Weston's friends also powerfully influenced him during this time, particularly Henrietta Shore, whose paintings of shells stimulated Weston to experiment with the same subject, and to experiment with other subjects, such as nudes, with the same "eye" for form and abstraction. In addition, Shore introduced him to the works of artists such as Brancusi and Kandinsky, two artists for whom Weston showed a great admiration. In fact, Weston's peppers, nudes and shells look very much like Brancusi's photographs of his own sculptures.
Although Weston claimed to have been less influenced by other photographers as by the work of painters, sculptors, musicians and even dancers (like Paul Robeson), his work bears striking similarities to photographers such as Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler, Imogen Cunningham and Alfred Steiglitz, all of whom were his contemporaries, and some of whom resented his work and vision. His time of escape in Mexico (and under the influence of Tina Modotti) apparently gave him the distance from these American contemporaries that he needed to return later to California and develop his own independent style.
After Mexico, Weston's work became increasingly more formal and less personal, while retaining sensuality through the use of curvilinear forms and tonalities that emphasized volume. In many cases, his images of rocks look almost human, while in other cases they impart an abstract, sculptural quality. Weston retained his commitments to previsualization and capturing the essence of the thing itself throughout his career, and in doing so, remained a staunch advocate of the photographic medium as distinctly different from that of painting, sculpture and other media. Because of this commitment, his photographs remain mimetic enough for the observer to understand the narrative, although the narrative significance continued to lose its importance in comparison to the form itself.
For this After Weston series, I attempted to capture Weston's "eye" by photographing natural and commonplace forms in Arizona. Similar to Weston, I sought to become immersed in my own sense of "place" and to create "formal simplifications", turning the lens on isolated fragments of what I consider to be sculptural forms within nature and my community. Although the locale may be different, I have used lighting, line, pattern and tone to imitate his style.
In my own work, like Weston, I have been inspired by more formal and abstract expressionistic works like those of Kandinsky, Hans Hoffman, and in the photography world the works of Aaron Siskind and Weston's Modern images. Weston's photography is important to me because I see him as a bridge-builder to the Modern era. As I view his body of work, I can see a progression that parallels that of my own art thus far, moving from a more Pictorialist aesthetic to a high regard for straight "realism" to a passion for formal concerns, the power of abstraction, and what I would call "the loss of a sense of self as I become immersed in the essence of the form of the other." Except in my case, the “other” has become The Other — namely, the Almighty, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.
The photos I have taken were inspired by several of Weston's works in particular. For instance, although rocks in Arizona are much more coarse than those smoothed by ocean waves, you may note the strong hint at the human form in the photos that depict (through my eyes) a hand patting a buttocks, combining Weston's love of humanlike forms with a tribute to his hand-like "Rock Erosion, Point Lobos." Likewise, you will note strong similarities between Weston's images and my own of a burned tree, between his "Stump" and my own cactus stump against the sky, and between his burned out car and my glass with a bullet hole. In addition, I have attempted to craft anthropomorphic forms from rocks akin to Weston's concretions and other rock formations.
Trying to view the world through eyes like Weston's proved to be a daunting challenge. I had to continuously pull myself back from my own unique way of seeing. The first photo outings were a wash, as nearly all the images looked like my own, and not like a Weston, for my preference at the time was for more angular forms rather than curvilinear, and I had a tendency to more flat tonal qualities instead of Weston's typically broad ranges. I also gained a thorough appreciation for the amount of time it must have taken Weston to find and "see" these images, then search for the decisive moment when the image could be made as he wished. As I said to my wife, "If everyone was forced to do this, there would be no problem convincing them of the inherent difficulties and subsequent high intrinsic value of great photography."
