Aperture

APERTURE

Editor's Note

Although revered for his vibrant still lifes and haunting California landscapes, Edward Weston spent the major part of his career, from 1917 to 1948, perfecting a standard of photographic portraiture that has rarely been surpassed. Weston's timeless images of the fascinating people who crowded the canvas of his free-spirited life—among them, Robinson Jeffers, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Tina Modotti, Igor Stravinsky, James Cagney, Lincoln Steffens, D. H. Lawrence, Carl Sandburg, e. e. cummings, and Dorothea Lange— comprise a startling 70 percent of the photographer's oeuvre.

This monograph is the first published collection of Edward Weston's finest portraits. It shows the artist at his most inspired: vigorously rendering "the very substance, the deeper inner image" of sons, lovers, friends, and fellow artists with such immediacy that they linger in our mind's eye long after viewing. In his lifetime, Weston's photographs were published in Aperture beginning in 1952. In 1958, upon Weston's death, Nancy Newhall brought his pictures together in a single landmark issue that became known as "The Flame of Recognition."

In Portraits we learn that Weston seized the photographic moment through a shrewd and unusual technique: by only pretending to shoot film for a period of time before actually taking the photograph, and then flashing the lens cap without the subjects' knowing, he cleverly guided them beyond the rigid pose, sometimes even allowing his sitters to wander freely about the studio. From the smoldering intensity on the face of Mexican painter José Clemente Orozco to the beguilingly sensual elegance achieved in nude depictions of Charis Wilson (Weston's most enduring love), the photographer again and again transformed the immanent into the mystical.

In Weston's own words, "[Portrait] photography's greatest difficulty lies in the necessary coincidence of the sitter's revealment, the photographer's realization, the camera's readiness. But when these elements do coincide, portraits in any other medium, sculpture or painting, are cold, dead things in comparison ... for when the perfect spontaneous union is consummated, a human document, the very bones of life are bared."

As Susan Morgan writes in her biographical profile, "Weston's portraits are particularly revealing, capturing an extraordinary intimacy, the telling unguarded moments that so rarely occur between an artist and a subject."

Cole Weston and his son Kim Weston have played an invaluable role in helping Aperture with this monographic issue. Cole, widely respected for his own color photography, has over the years collaborated with Aperture on many projects about his father, and here provides a foreword. Of the Westons' four boys, it was Cole whom Edward Weston selected to carry on the printing and management of his estate. Cole's son Kim, a talented and successful black-and-white photographer in his own right, made many of the prints from original negatives that are reproduced in this collection. Were it not for the staff at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, home of the Edward Weston Archive, his lifetime's worth of work would not be so well preserved: Terence Pitts, Nancy Lutz, Dianne Nilsen, Amy Rule, and Trudy Wilner Stack are all to be acknowledged for their generous cooperation with Aperture and for the fine work they do.

THE EDITORS