Among the most original and innovative photographers of the twentieth century, Edward Weston had solid footing in both the Pictorialist and modern movements. Born in Chicago in 1886, he took up the camera professionally when he moved to Tropico (today Glendale), California, at the age of twenty-one, opening his own portrait studio. The small palladium print Prologue to a Sad Spring typifies Weston’s early Pictorialist work, in which theatrical, soft-focus lighting yielded painterly effects. Weston used shadows and screens to create otherworldly atmospheres that, together with evocative titles, suggest a narrative. Here, the figure is Margrethe Mather, who became romantically involved with Weston shortly after they met in 1913, a relationship that changed into a creative partnership through the early 1920s.
Soon after making this photograph, Weston’s work underwent a major transformation in which he shed the artificial trappings of Pictorialism. Just before relocating to Mexico in 1922, he visited Middletown, Ohio, where his brother-in-law worked in the steel industry. Taken by the stark beauty of the American Rolling Mills Company, he made a series of photographs that were unlike anything he had done previously. Abstracted images of pipes, smokestacks, and utility poles against the white winter sky marked the beginning of Weston’s photographic shift to modernism (see 46.61.24). His aims, as recorded in a “daybook” he began keeping in 1923, explain this transition: “To see the Thing Itself is essential: the quintessence revealed direct . . . to photograph a rock and have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock.” For Weston, a photograph was not merely a factual record or formally attractive composition; it communicated the essence of the object or scene before the camera.
Rebecca Morse, Curator, Wallis Annenberg Photography Department
2024
Bibliography
Mora, Gilles, ed. Edward Weston: Forms of Passion. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995.
