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On this beautiful evening, to the second of our lecture programs in the evenings, highlighting the Edward Weston exhibit which I trust you've at least been able to see once and will agree with me is really an extraordinary experience, on which we probably won't have again during our lifetimes at least. We've been most pleased with the response to the exhibit. It's really been tremendous and one thing which as gratified me especially is the response that we've had to the show from photographers who have returned to the show numerous times to gain the experience of Weston's art; both to look at him in terms of his technique and his aesthetic judgments. The show is really very remarkable and especially an important experience for us because I'm sure it's something you're all acutely aware of whether you're just beginning to look at photography or whether you've practiced photography and have been aware of it for some time that we are really at a very early stage in our appreciation of photography as an art and as a curator I'm also acutely aware of the early stage that we're at in terms of scholarship on the medium. It really would be equivalent to the history of art much earlier than the 19th century. We're really at a very early stage and it's especially a pleasure to have Ben Maddow here this evening because his monograph on Edward Weston called Edward Weston: 50 Years which is really a very beautiful book, which I wish I could afford myself. I hope you can have a chance to see it in the library at least. His book to me represents a particular kind of methodology in approaching a one man's work in the history of photography which is very different than what we have come to see so far in books on the history of photography. Most people that have been interested in photography so far, in terms of writing, have come from an academic point of view, have been trained as art historians or have come from a point of view as a fine arts photographer but Mr. Maddow's book on Edward Weston could truly be called a biography and the subtitle of it is an illustrated biography. So the story of Weston's life is told in terms of those fine photographs that are included in tremendously excellent reproductions and also in terms of the great work that Mr. Maddow took to include passages from Edward Weston's own writings and reactions to his own times, to other photographers and to things which contributed to his aesthetic sensibility to his, which made his photography the remarkable thing that it is. Mr. Maddow is a poet, a playwright, director of documentary films and a writer of documentary films. He, as I said, didn't come to his interest in photography from an academic point of view, it was very much through a point of view of being involved at a very early stage with the making of documentaries. One of his documentaries which you're maybe familiar with, it's entitled The Savage Eye. It's with great pleasure that I present Mr. Maddow this evening to talk about Edward Weston. His talk will be divided into two parts. The first will concern itself with Edward Weston's treatment of the nude and will consider his possible reactions to women in that context and the second part of his talk, which he invites the audience to participate in as much as you'd like in terms of reactions. He'll present his personal ideas about Edward Weston as an artist and a photographer. Mr. Ben Maddow: Thanks a lot. I believe I ought to warn you first before I begin that for my point of view an artist like Weston or indeed any artist and therefore any photographer is a product not only of his aesthetic ideas, about of the times that he's lived through, where he comes from, the formation of his own character because these govern his choices and of the society in which he happens to live and be influenced by; either in opposition to it or in agreement with it, so this point of view which you might call a mixed psychological - sociological treatment of an artist which is very familiar in the treatment of statesmen and writers and even painters as been rarely applied to photographers and so tonight I just want to give you a sampling of one way in which this method can be used by investigating Weston's attitude toward women who were tremendous influence in his life and once connected with it, his treatment of women in his photographs of women. So we'll begin. Weston was born almost a century ago, in 1886. He was born in the Midwest, in the suburb of Chicago. He was first a photographic amateur as indeed most of us in this room were. All of us got a camera as a child and this is very long American tradition. After that he became a portraitist, in other words a business man who made photographs for his livelihood and finally crowned with honors and poverty, he became by degrees an obsessive artist. Now, his life was full of sexual experience which is not all that unusual of course but it's particularly not unusual in the bohemia of what was Los Angeles in the 20s because Weston came to Los Angeles from Chicago, from the suburb Chicago about 1909 and entered this particular group of artists, musicians, painters in the early 1920s which was just after World War I. Similar things were happening in Paris and in Berlin and so on, so that Los Angeles, through the medium of magazines which were being published at a time. I'm going in the magazines, but was it kind of a miniature reflection of what was happening everywhere in the Western world. He wrote about these things in his famous day books. Now, since so many and maybe all of the nudes he photographed a very compilation with names of the nudes that he photographed where people with whom he had very close personal relationships, it's rather interesting that with certain exceptions; perhaps a dozen negatives out of hundreds the nudes have no faces. Now, it seemed to me when I first looked at this interesting fact that it was simply a continuation of a romantic tradition which was based on the historic accident that both Greek and Roman statues had been buried by time and so had lost their limbs and their heads. So the romanticization of the classic nude cut-off here and at the knees and here was an accident of the fact they had fallen off their pedestals. Now, Weston was in many ways a sculptor who simply used the materials of photography. Nevertheless, I think that's only the superficial truth. No one can look at these photographs of nudes without some sensual vibrations. They are not simply just abstract zones of light and dark. For one thing, they are clearly naked with or without faces and we walk in this exhibit with our clothing on, so there is some kind of electricity that passes between us and these photographs. So I think that one key, maybe not the whole key but one interesting key to these decapitations is buried in Weston's character and particularly in his two-sided attitude toward women. Now when he was still in business of making portraits; rather poor living in the town of Glendale, California which at the time was called Tropical, characteristic name, he wrote as follows: "Woman who is a fire here is not genuinely interested in art. With herd as opposed along with other ways of culture hunting, all she wants is sex and all her gestures are directed by sex and the poor boobs of American men are but money machines." Here I think he is reflecting a prejudice he must have acquired in his early teens, an expression which must have been said a thousand times by the men around him, by his relatives but on the other side and maybe these two sides are not too far apart after all, was a devotion not to a particular woman but to woman in general. She is that mythic figure; powerful, dreaded, hated, courted, reluctantly loved. By circumstances almost classic in their simplicity, I think we can trace this double feeling in Weston to the early death of his mother. He wrote when he left his family to go to Mexico when he was in his 40s. In a letter to one of the four sons that he had at the time, "Baby kins called" this is how the letter begins. Six months since I have seen you. Do you even remember how I look? I wonder because my mother died when I was five and all that returns to me of her were a pair of black piercing eyes, burning eyes maybe burning with fever. But Mr. McGee, was a personal friend of his, "Says you are only image of me. So all you have to do is look in the mirror and see daddy and yourself all in one. My greatest desire is for ten minutes romp at hide and go seek with you, to hear your shrieks of joy, to see your eyes snap and sparkle or have you jump from the terrific heights of some table, jump with a shiver across the yawning chasm and to the sheer safety in my arms." Now I quote much of this letter because it seems to express his own childish desires with such innocent simplicity. His sister Mae was 13 when their mother died and she is very strong character in her own right. She was married to John Seamen, an electrical engineer, who went to work for a railway company in Los Angeles. Now, his sister Mae sent letter after letter urging young Weston to come to California and live with them. "Darling Ed, can't you come before June? John says he will guarantee you a position. And of course he wouldn't hear of you staying anywhere but with us. Eat while I'm preparing to eat you." So Weston did come and remained in California most of his life. There exists a wonderful snapshot of him; short, muscular, serious; I'll show it to you a bit later, holding his smiling sister up in the air over his head with one hand. A very typical picnic feat in early 20th century America, I don't think we do it much anymore. When 16 years later, in the first tentative break from his family Weston went east to seek another course for himself. He stopped in Middleton, Ohio where the Siemens were now relocated. He was here; he took the famous shop focus columnar stacks of that factory. In fact, the Siemens paid for his visit to New York City where he met Stigglets and Schiller and Paul Strand. His sister Mae wrote him shortly afterward and I quote this letter to show the strong connection between these two members of the family, sister and brother. "Go little brother, go and fulfill your Destiny. Go little frail and inward driven soul, pressed by the mighty urge of your genius. Your mind has left the side of mine and gone beyond into the maze of those strange things as yet unknown. This says my mind but as I write, my heart cries out and begs you to come again to brush this tired of life of mine with one more shock that I may feel the urge of life once more and contact with things there are." Well, through the rather elaborate conventional language, there is really a tremendous drive of feeling here. Weston often sent his sister prints of his work and she wrote, and she wrote quite often her deep appreciation of them, mixed with intense personal feelings of depression. "Two letters from you in two days and then the wonderful prints. Oh my dear, do you know what it means when one is overworked, overanxious and feeling at all once allure is going, to have the breath of life put back in one's body and the zest of living given to one again? I shall keep your letters to read again." In the opinion of Weston's second official wife, the remarkable Clarisse Wilson, Weston's sister Mae was a sexual hell raiser. The strength of her passionate faith in Weston and its burden supported and weighted him down for much of his life. When Weston first in 1906, at the age of 20, agreed to stay with her in California he proposed bringing a girl with him from Chicago. His sister was indignant. She picked out her own girl for him. This girl was Flora Chandler, daughter of a family who was wealthy in real estate and eventually acquired the Los Angeles Times, is still a very powerful family in California. Weston obligingly fell in love with Flora and they married and settled down into a nice worrisome middle class life. Portrait studio in Tropico, acreage in the country, four sons but Weston, that tethered tiger, was soon straining at the domestic chain. Of his early affairs we know only about two. The details have been burned by Weston when he destroyed his very earliest journals. In 1912 to 1913, he met a most extraordinary woman. Marguerita Mather, who was also a photographer. Ostensibly, they went into partnership. He fell in love with her but the extraordinary difficulty was that the woman was a lesbian which didn't mean that she didn't have tremendous affection, even love for him. Human feelings simply can't be categorized this simply when you look at all the facts but at any case, she resisted his advances for almost 10 years. Did his wife know about these adventures? Yes, because people took great care to tell her about them but she was a tough insufferable, people called her, fundamentally brave and superficially hysterical woman. She went to work as a school teacher and the money held the family together for many crucial years. It wasn't cheap to raise four sons. Now, Marguerita Mather, Weston's partner, most certainly affected his work. She too exhibited in the numerous salons of the period. There were an incredible number of place where you could exhibit photographs at that time. She would often supply a literary title to Weston's photographs. They spent 10 days together at last in the beach house. This pleasure was granted because Weston was about to make his trip to Mexico. It was a gesture certainly made out of love and cynically, it must be said that perhaps the gesture was made because Weston was about to depart from his marriage and from America for some months with another woman. Now, Weston didn't always treat Marguerita Mather with grace. Years later he wrote as follows: "An amusing tale came to me about the association of Marguerita and Edward that when she came within my horizon I was still doing babies on bare skin rugs. Not true, I never could've afforded a bare skin rug. I put myself now on record as owing a great deal to Marguerita, taking from her all she had to offer and leaving her not when I had all I could get but because she was draining of all I had. It got to be far from an even exchange and when I left her she literally was on her knees begging to be my slave but not to leave her. I will take from anyone all they can give me and try to return them as much or more." It's very interesting that Weston constantly copied out quotations from the authors he admired and many of these authors were printed in the avant-garde magazines of the 20s. However, one of them is from Emerson and the quotation is, "Genius borrows nobly." Now, while Weston was still in Glendale and part of this witty, sexually liberated circle to which Marguerita Mather had introduced him, he met a painter's model and a silent screen actress who had played a series of Foreign Vamps. None of you are old enough to remember those films, I'm sure. But if you go to film museums you may have seen them. Now, this woman, the luscious Tina McDoughty was at that time married to a poet and an artist but she began an affair with the fiery vivid Weston almost at once. Her husband took Weston's prints to Mexico City, made a number of important contacts for him and then died quite suddenly of cholera. A year and a half later, Weston took Tina McDoughty's advice and accompanied by his oldest son Chandler, left with her on a boat for Mexico. There is no doubt that McDoughty was a formidably interesting woman. By no means the intellectual that Mather was, she was sensitive, encouraging, passionate and voluptuously beautiful as you will see when we show some photographs of her. Weston was very much in love with her but she had no intention of being faithful any one man, certainly not at that time of her life. Past and present, her experience had been striped alternately with sadness and sensuality. Her affairs troubles Weston very deeply. She never made any effort to hide them. Her friends visited her rooms overnight, a room just two doors down the patio in the house that she and Weston occupied. Weston's view of her was romantic and yet true that she had sold herself to the rich and given herself to the poor. On one page of his unexperidated journal, because there had been passages in the printed version that he had crossed off with a pencil but they are still quite legible, the original, that's one of the most famous passages in all the photographic literature that I know of it anyway. Let me read it to you. These are Weston's words: The night before we'd been alone, so seldom it happens now; she called me to her room and our lips met for the first time since New Year's Eve. The doorbell rang. Chandler and a friend. Our mood was gone. A restless night, morning came clear and brilliant. The Mexican sun, I thought, would reveal everything. Something of the tragedy that our present life may be captured. Nothing can be hidden under this cloudless cruel sky and so it was as she leaned the white washed wall, lips quivering, nostrils dilating, eyes heavy with the gloom of unspent rain clouds. I drew close to her, whispered something and kissed her. A tear rolled down her cheek and then I captured forever the moment. Let me see, F8, one tenth, K1 filter and chromatic film and so on I'm sorry to say that artists are really very cruel people. I think they have to be if obsessed, pressed for time, oppressed with all kinds of other material problems an artist is devoured by the energy of his work, he often is very very cool and unobservant of the people around him who simply cannot understand this kind of phenomenon. You have to admit it, it's difficult to understand. Still, there it is. We must not forget however that Tina McDoughty was not primarily interested in sexual security. She was from the time of her visit to Mexico or possibly earlier, an extremely political person. The communist groups in Mexico rode in the early 20s on the thrilling wave of the Russian revolution. Its promise of relief for the peasants seemed particularly to apply to the Mexican peon. Nor do I discount the old force of romantic rhetoric upon the artists and intellectuals of Mexico City. Tina McDoughty was increasingly involved. She called it social service in her letters to Weston later on and in fact by the 30, she was almost certainly a courier for the Communist International, an organization which no longer exists. She appeared and disappeared in the critical capitals of Europe of the time; Vienna, Berlin, Paris, Madrid. Weston, on the other hand, was furiously non-political and more Midwestern in his libertarian opinions than he could ever admit. He had particular distaste for communism. Any long term and faithful relation to him would've been more and more impossible for McDoughty but her emotional adventures troubled and stimulated him to a high pitch of creative energy. The nudes he made of Tina have this ambivalence, this recognition that he was a more sexually powerful, more hedonistic character than even he was himself. She strongly reeled him. She has breasts, belly, legs, pubic hair and a face. The photographs of her taken on the tower roof of the house they lived in are quite beyond abstraction. They are beautiful with desire and love. Meantime, Weston, following the ritual pattern of all adulteries kept assuring his wife was not his mistress. It was almost, if not quite, true. He wrote Flora frequently from Mexico. "Did my departure and subsequent life have any of the earmarks of a desertion? Did I not plan the trip long before Robo's death and with him, did he and his mother beg me to accompany Tina? When I reached Mexico City my first move was to establish a business. Why? To attempt to make money. Why? For my family. Perhaps I was not delicate enough with my affairs in Glendale, yet no one has anything on me. Yet I am made the goat while all others know is libertines are honored and respected citizens. Why? Because I was not just a regular person, I dared to dress, act talk differently from those around me. I was not a minimal, I was not to be pigeon holed nor catalogued." On my remark that before he went to Mexico, he customarily wore a great dark velvet cape and carried a silver headed cane and had one of these great flowing ties, I've forgotten the exact terminology for them. He looked in short like somebody out of the French 19th century. Now, Weston returned to Glendale, though only for a short time, then went back to Mexico City. During the stormy, unsettled period he had at least six love affairs; sometimes with two or three at the same time. One was with a public stenographer Crystal Gang who cast his horoscope as follows: "Reach highest attainment through knowledge and regenerative love action of heart. Love, beauty, order, harmony and elegant surroundings, they should not be circumscribed when giving out their true work of genius." Her language is a bit odd because she was a German immigrant but the terminology itself is of course entirely characteristic. Two other loves at the same time were young housemaids who'd followed him from Mexico City to Los Angeles. Still others were women like Brita Waddell, who was quite a known dancer in Los Angeles of that time. When we photographed in his studio, stopping their improvisation - they loved to improvise. It was a very common thing to do at the time, sometimes to photograph and sometimes to make love. These studies are all headless, as in a sense, so were the affairs. There was one important exception. She was the oil millionaire Edward Dohini's secretary and a very bright very free person. Her name was Myriam Learner and there were quite a number of nudes of her in the collection. He wrote to her, "I sent you eight photographs unmounted from our last sitting, or was it lying?" I mean, Weston was not beyond using the ordinary methods of all lovers, obviously. The mixture of a flattery and feeling. "You are an ideal person to work with and I felt your beauty very keenly, and by this I do not mean just the undeniable physical beauty you possess." He was very pleased with these nudes of Myriam Learner for they represented his current ideal; simplified form and in this spirit he had taken many others, including the famous pear shaped nude. Not only is this nude faceless but Weston complained he had to retouch the blotches on her skin. Perfection was what he wanted, not the confusions of a common humanity. As he wrote in his journal about an incident with a Mexican maid: "Elena returned so much from our premonition. Yet I was not far off. A brother came to take her home. I confess being sad, the house is lonesome. She was a nice little play thing to love. Oh merciful god, save me from the boredom of intellectual women" which obviously these two girls were not, they could scarcely speak English for once, but here is a curious thing that neither Myriam Learner, nor Tina McDoughty, nor birth of Waddell and several others that I can name were neither simple, nor illiterate and he was tremendously fascinated with all of them. It was a simple contradiction he felt no need to resolve. It troubles us but never him. The late Nancy Newhall was a very brilliant writer who had planned to do his biography for a long time, told me that she thought a woman was the pivot which each change in his life eventually turned. This is a rather romantic idea which considering the romantic nature of adultery is probably true. Now, when Weston moved to Carmel, he met a painter named Henrietta Shore. She was a large, emotional rather masculine woman and she had a collection of shelves which are used of models for her still lifes. He wrote about her work, "Woman as creative artists sore in my half contemptuous estimation when I do such work, a deeply feel at powerfully rendered expression from the subjective. The affirmation of a mystic. I must be inordinately aroused to use the word mystic, connected as it is with so much bunk, so many impossible people and I write it rather apologetically knowing no other word to exactly convey my impression." Now these shells were the stimulus to Weston's new obsession, to make with exposures as long as four or five hours, cabbage leaves as fast as mountains, mushrooms as big as mosques and peppers like headless nudes. Tina McDoughty was as most of us still are, struck by the sensuality of these vegetables. The photographer Mina White from a somewhat Jungian point of view thought this series to be related to sexual archetypes. Weston was furious. He considered them abstract and nothing more. He wrote to David McAlpin who was a collector and a patron of photography a comment that I think is a little off the point: "I have always been on good terms with my subconscious." Now, many of the vegetables that were found in the local market in Carmel were brought to him by a woman who should be considered really his second wife. She was a talented photographer who'd been a refugee from Poland at an early age. Her name was Sonia Muskoviak. He made many nudes of her; again, without that curious feature that conveys personality, the human face. He also made portraits of her but only of her head. His attitude toward her is very frank. In a letter to Myriam Learner who has been in Europe he said, "Sonia is still with me, a record time. Why, it is hard to say. Actually, my love at this time my life is very abstract, non possessive" but his next passion was to be far deeper and more devastating. He met Carisse Wilson in Carmel in 1933 and he began a sort of a romantic adulterous relationship with her though he was not married at the time to Sonia Muskoviak but they had codes and secret entrances and secret departures. Though many years his junior, she persuaded him to marry her and he divorced his first wife, they had been not divorced all these years and for a long time they had an intense and joyful relationship. The marriage was almost as interesting to their friends as it was to themselves. Great nudes were born out of this childless marriage and many of them have Carisse's beautiful and open face but the marriage ended. Weston wrote to Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, "I have not figured out who would be best all around bet to move in with me when Carisse goes. I'll let you know name of fortunate one." You must remember that he was quite capable of joking too. "Of course in making a choice I must realize that I can cook. In fact, I can do almost everything." The curious thing was that this happened in July of '45, when he was already ill with the disease that would closely kill him and he would take very few photographs after that time. His desires perhaps out of habit were far greater than his deeds. He ended one sad shaky letter with an obscene salutation. It was servicing again that good old American simplicity of the obscene. The complicated truth was something else, that his attitudes toward women; contradictory and sometimes violently so did form a very large part of his life and his life, to a degree, he was unable to sensor it, had a strong influence on his art. Of course, he would've denied it but he was, fortunately for him and for us, a woman haunted man. Alright, now we can look at some of the photographs and see whether you agree with me or not. This is a photograph of his father, who was a devoted archery fiend and razor white leg orange chickens, extremely American combination. This is the picture I was telling you about, lifting his sister up with one hand. He was really an extremely strong short squarely built and very energetic person. This is the sort of picture he was taking, this is not his photograph. The photographs of this kind that he took don't exist anymore but he made a living among other things by taking photographs of the dead which was a very common custom in the early 20th century and late 19th century America. This is his first wife, Flora Chandler, the school teacher and it's a very lyric expression of his feeling about her. It was said that if she had an emotional crisis she would take the bed and rule from the bed as though she were on the bridge of a ship, had it both ways. This is a kind of picture that Weston was taking non professionally, that is not for a living. The sort of picture that you would put in the salons and this had some title which I've forgotten at the moment, some very fancy title given as I say by Marguerita Mather. This is in fact another such picture of Marguerita Mather; I think this can be focused a little better. I don't know though. (Informal Talk) You've all seen this photograph. Is it upstairs in the exhibit? You can see, it's a very beautiful photograph. Actually, these slides are to remind you of them, they don't display anything of the actual beautiful quality but it does show something of the turn of his mind at the time, this kind of romanticism but he won a number of prizes at the time because he is quite good at this kind of photography. And it shouldn't be entirely neglected either in any consideration of the aesthetic accomplishments of American photography. There is some very very beautiful work done in this style. This was one of his first nudes. (Informal Talk) A woman came into his studio and asked to be photographed in the nude, that's how it happened. This woman was a warned photographer, a member of the photo succession whose name was Ann Briggman who herself took many nude photographs, most of them of herself, by the way. I think the next one is of the same person. (Informal Talk) There is a funny story about this. There is this letter from the niece to Ann Briggman saying, "Dear aunty, saw your picture in the window." This is an early picture by Imogene Cunningham of Marguerita Mather and Edward Weston. In fact she took several and I think we have several on tap here. That's another. She was really an extremely interesting woman. Very few of her photographs still exist. Tragic figure, actually. I'm not sure what Imogene Cunningham's attitude was, you feel a faint irony in these photographs. Actually she called them all 'the lovers.' This is the photograph that Weston took when he visited his brother in law, the engineer, at the Akron Steelworks. It's reputedly the first shot focus photography that he took. Well, number one it wasn't. Number two, this isn't quite sharp either but this was among the prints that he took to New York to show the Stigglets. This is a picture of Alfred Stigglets at that time, not taken by Weston. Somebody else. Very fierce, egotistical man with a private income who ran the gallery and chose the photographers that truly interested him. Once they became well known he generally dropped them. He liked people to be dependent upon him but he was really a remarkable, very great American personality and a marvelous photographer many of whose prints have never been seen, they are still in the library of Congress. This is a photograph that ended the photo succession which was the kind of soft, romantic photography that I showed you a small example of it at the very beginning. This photograph was taken by Paul Strand who was a habitu of the gallery which was owned by Stigglets and who had gone there for four or five years with his prints. This was taken about 1916 or 17, when Strand was very very young, taken with a prism in front of the lens, a sneak photograph in other words. Part of a whole series which really changed the whole history of American photography and it was recognized by Stigglets as having done so and there were statements by Strand which prove this. I hope somebody the Museum will have a show of Strand's work. This is Tina McDoughty. That's the photograph on the tile roof of the house in Mexico City where they lived. The nude has a face. Diego Rivera, when he was painting the murals for the Department of Agriculture wanted Tina McDoughty to pose for him. Weston raised such a jealous fuss that she said no and Weston compromised by giving Rivera this photograph and a number of others, and you can see these if you're ever down in Mexico City how much they remarkably resemble Tina McDoughty. This is one of the few photographs that Weston took of scenes in Mexico. Most of them are far less human than this, they are generally courtyards, all very beautiful or clouds or landscapes. Other people have gone to Mexico like Cartier Besson and simply never saw anything of this sort. It was there of course, all these things were there in Mexico. This was a photograph taken by Tina McDoughty in Mexico City at that time, so you see what Weston looked like then. 1924, he was then 38. Very intense man, whom people whom he met Rivera and all the others of that circle never forgot. This is a photograph of D H Lawrence that Weston took at the time and it was of this particular photograph that Ansell Adams said, "Well, none of Weston's work is really optically sharp." Well, this certainly isn't and Weston knew that it wasn't and he really faintly disliked because he didn't like Lawrence very much either but it's still, I think, a very expressive photograph of Lawrence. This is one of the women in this circle of friends in Mexico City. She looks to be a very remarkable woman, she was remarkably unremarkable. She adopted an Indian name though, she was a sort of Parisian half intellectual published a volume of incredibly bad love poetry which was my misfortune to have to read but she had an extremely interesting face, no question about that and that's [inaudible 00:49:45] would know. It's interesting, this photograph is taken several years later actually but it was a man he had met down there. These photographs, the Mexican ones, were taken with quite a small camera and the prints were therefore made by enlargement. I know it sounds like heresy because everybody thinks Weston made nothing but contact prints. This is not true. People also say he never cropped, that's not true either. Although cropping was generally minimal. This is a part of a whole series after he's returned from Mexico made by a series of dancers. I don't know who this is particularly but much of this is solarised or not quite solarisation. I'm not certain what the process is but here, it's not the same as man raised in Paris at about the same time. Another from that series. Don't forget these were positions taken during improvisation inside the photographic studio. Even more complex, abstract patterns. This is the famous pear shaped nude, 1925. A remarkable thing is this almost no longer resembles a person and yet, if you look at his vegetables which I'll show you in a moment, they look more like nudes than almost this does. Although again, that would be something that Weston fiercely denied. Of this photograph, Tina McDoughty said that it was clearly two people making love. It was absolutely clear to her, she wrote it in a letter. I don't think it's quite as specific as that but there is no doubt of the sensuality of these forms and when Strand photographed mushrooms, although they are and then again, extremely beautiful, you do not have a sensual quality of this sort. Is this one in the collection? Does anybody remember? Now, there is a photograph made by Weston who said, "I'll show them what's really sexy about vegetables" and I think the next one is it. That's it. I think the sensual character often governed his choice of which cloud landscapes affected him. It wasn't the only thing, you mustn't mistake my meaning but as one of the elements, its resemblance to sensual forms. Of course, if you haven't seen that exhibit you must go because this print is so incredibly more beautiful. Now this is a rock form which also has very much of a tactile quality. I said earlier that he was in many ways, he could be considered a sculptor who used photographic methods. It's not quite true of course, it's obviously on a surface, it's not true but I think it's an interesting way to look at it that he did think in depth and around the corners of forms and not merely the division of the front plane into sections. Although there is that as well. In fact, a large part of the effect of his photographs is the tension between the three-dimensional form which one gets from it and the two-dimensional pattern that is actually there. That's a very remarkable construction. This is Sonia Muskoviak who is responsible for the choice of many of the subjects we've seen in the previous series. Don't forget that the rock forms were done at Point Lobos which was a few miles from their home. This and the next photograph were arranged forms that he himself made. He didn't discover everything and choose it, sometimes he actually arranged it. I thought you'd be interested to see at least two of these. By the way, that lily of California appears in every California photographer's work. And this is a shell he simply took out of his studio and placed in this saddled formation. I'm sorry to say this transparency gives you nowhere near the velvety blacks that are in the original. I think that's in the show as well, is it not? This is Carisse Wilson and so are the next two photographs. Three photographs. This is the famous one taken rather early in their relationship. Now, this begins the journeys that he and Carisse took on their two Guggenheim trips to Western America and I think there are marked signs, particularly toward 1941 of his obsession with death and funeral subjects. Most of the photographs taken on the Guggenheim trips were of landscapes and they have their special problems which I'm not going to go into tonight at all but I wanted to show you this group because it seems to me that he knew quite well that he was getting desperately ill, although the disease was a very long one. And this obsession was just as true. These photographs were made for, curiously enough, for an addition of Walt Whitman's leaves of grass. This was taken at the MGM Studios which really look like death today. This is the beginning of a whole new series of photographs. This starts in 1940 but it continues through about '47 or '48, of photographs of [inaudible 00:58:36] like the last quartets of Beethoven. They have a mystic context which I would have to take at least two hours and then probably not succeed in describing what I meant by that phrase. I'll show them to you. They are the last series in this group. He began to face away from the ocean and toward the cliffs at Point Lobos, they become extremely complex, dense. Very dark, wet, misty. A carpenter went to an exhibit and saw this said, "Oh, those are the stars in the sky" and Weston was tremendously pleased with his remark. That's one of the last photographs taken of Weston and now we can have the lights. Are there any questions? Anybody have any questions? I can't see any hands. If not, we're going to terminate the evening. Alright? Male Speaker: What can you tell us about the historiography? I just read your biography of Weston and it seems to me that there is a great deal of what's quoted in his day books that really gave me a hunger and apparently Carisse Wilson is still alive and may write about him an autobiography. Mr. Ben Maddow: She's been threatening to do so for 25 years. What was your question? Male Speaker: The question is, how much stuff did you have access to? How much stuff survives that, in other words, not so much appears to have showed up in your book. I gathered that what you were able to say, you saw a lot more and I'd be interested in knowing what other sorts of historic material exists. Mr. Ben Maddow: For example, when he knew that he was ill and going to die eventually, he wrote to each of his past girlfriends, ones that he could remember at all because some of them simply had disappeared and no way of finding him and asked them to return his love letters to him and curiously enough six or seven of them did, it was a very generous thing to do really. The Learner Letters is a whole series, she turned over to the Bancroft and if you want to go to Bancroft Library in San Francisco, they've got a complete file of them. In addition to that, there are something like 2,000 or 3,000 letters to him from all sorts of people in the vault in which his negatives are kept and a number of other documents of course of this kind. Male Speaker: Who is in charge of that, his sons? Mr. Ben Maddow: His sons. He has an executor, his son. Much of that is irrelevant of course, but it governs one's judgment, yes. Male Speaker: What's much of the letters you say are relevant to biography? Mr. Ben Maddow: They reinforce other things and it's impossible to quote all the letters that everybody wrote or even that he ever wrote. There is a whole series of letters from somebody that I've never been able to locate, impossible to tell if it's a man or a woman because it's their initials. The first name is initialed. They were all in the last three years of his life, they are very personal, very warm. I've no idea from whom they came, nobody else in the family knows. By the way, it is not boasting at all to say that I know far more about Weston than his sons do because nobody had the patience to go through all this stuff. Really you know, unless you have a writer's madness. [Inaudible 01:03:11] Yes, they did. That's particularly true of Brett and Cole. Brett actually printed with his father looking over his shoulder, a sample of 400 - 500 prints which are now in the Huntingdon, California. Then Cole was made an executor. There is a lot of quarrels in the family of course over all these questions. Natural, quite natural. Yes? Male Speaker 2: It's sort of interesting to me learn that he [inaudible 01:03:55] portraits had disappeared. He wrote an article on the photographic [inaudible 01:04:02] in Camera Craft or something and yet, did they systematically destroy them or Mr. Ben Maddow: He destroyed a tremendous number of his negative and practically nothing of his early glass plates exist. He broke them up. He didn't like the work, he destroyed it. He didn't think too much of this commercial work now. In fact, I've quoted in the biography I believe, or haven't I. I think I have, his fury at people coming and saying they want this retouched or that retouched. He used to make people sign their names to this statement, "I will not request any retouchment" but that was in the latter part of when he became better known. Before that he did everything for them and believe me, if you look at the ordinary human face, it takes a lot of retouching. [End of recording] |
