Photography: Peppers From Heaven

• Share

What photographer satisfied the biographical requirements for an artist better than Edward Weston? Like Gauguin, he made a mid-life lunge for the southern latitudes, putting family and studio on hold while he pondered the cactus in Mexico. His "commercial" portrait work he churned out with contempt, all but using one hand to press the shutter and the other to hold his nose. And among his remarkable inventory of lovers were the kind of women who not only danced naked for his camera but brought along their own finger cymbals.

Weston's life, no less than his art, made him one of the fabled figures in American photography. His grumpy, exalted journals, published after his death under the title Daybooks, are full of aesthetic transports and sexual interludes. But they also show another side of his temperament, a no-nonsense sobriety that he called upon to achieve the condensed art of his mature years, when his aims were both clear and complex: "To photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock."

The centennial of Weston's birth this year is being marked by three museum shows. The J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, Calif., will exhibit 45 of his pictures later this month. Sixty are going up in December at the Art Institute of Chicago. But the real Weston juggernaut opened earlier this month at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: a sweeping retrospective of 237 prints. Organized by the University of Arizona's Center for Creative Photography and selected by Beaumont Newhall, the gray eminence of photo history, the exhibition will run in San Francisco through Feb. 15, then travel over the next two years to a dozen other cities, including New York, Washington, Los Angeles and Atlanta.

The dual nature unified in Weston's work was evident early in his life. He was 20 when he left his home in a Chicago suburb to visit a sister living in a quiet town near Los Angeles. Eventually he was married there, established a portrait business and fathered the four sons whom he loved fiercely all his life. But a part of him resisted domestication just as fiercely. He found his friends and lovers among the pioneer enclaves of the West Coast counterculture, attic dwellers who shared his penchant for vegetarianism and modern art.

Weston was among the generation of photographers whose conversion to sharp focus from soft-edged pictorialism was the hinge on which the rest of the century's camerawork would turn. By the early 1920s he had already established an international reputation for mildly swoony images in gray-beige tones. He had also grown restless with pictorialism, which took its inspiration from impressionism, symbolism and the damper moments of Whistler. In time, he found a new expressive vocabulary in the angles and hard lines of constructivism and cubism, which he matched to a new photographic method. The focus was sharp. The prints were made directly from the negative, without an enlarger. The chemical manipulations that produced the soulful fogs of pictorialism were forgotten.