AJC, The Lens Of A Giant

Below is an excerpt of a review from the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.
To read the entire review please access the AJC web site.

DATE: October 7, 2007
PUBLICATION: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
BYLINE: CATHERINE FOX
TITLE: The Lens Of A Giant

EXHIBITION: The Weston Legacy

Atlanta Celebrates Photography is always a great opportunity for exposure (forgive me) to contemporary photography. This year, more than in fests past, brings 20th-century masters to the fore.

“Loving/Longing,” an icon-packed group exhibition opening Thursday at Agnes Scott College, casts a wide net of American and European greats. For depth of focus, there’s the High Museum’s presentation of Harry Callahan’s photos of his wife Eleanor and “The Weston Legacy” at the Atlanta gallery Lumière.

Although the Lumiere show honors a family of photographers, its center is, inevitably, the patriarch. Edward Weston is, after all, one of the giants of “straight photography.” Many of the memorable images in this show are embedded in our cultural consciousness, and they exerted a profound influence on ensuing generations.

Weston came of age artistically when photography was flexing its muscles as an art form. Disavowing pretensions to painting, practitioners on several continents championed the clarity and realism that they felt represented the medium’s unique character.

Together with the like-minded West Coast artists in Group f/64, Weston took up the call. In nudes, nature studies and California landscapes, he sought to render “the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself.”

To that end, he depicted objects isolated and free of distractions. The velvety black void in which “Shell’s” (1927) nautilus floats accentuates its shape and the crisp details he was able to record with his 8×10 view camera. It becomes the very shellness of shell.

But “straight” did not always mean straightforward. Weston often presented the dunes, the shore, the rocky hills of his beloved landscape shorn of context — an anchoring horizon line, say — so that the photos teeter between reality and abstraction.

A combination of high vantage point, spatial ambiguity and crystalline clarity in “Surf, Point Lobos” (1938) turns the vista of sea crashing on the shore into a yin-yang of light and dark.

And realism doesn’t mean nothing but the facts. Out of time, and context, still as a Byzantine icon, his images simmer with spirituality, animism almost.

But they are earthy, too: This is an artist who managed to make a disembodied pair of knees sexy, not to mention a cabbage leaf. In said close-up, the languid leaf suggests the drape of lingerie to come-hither effect. Just to be sure you don’t miss the point, Lumiere juxtaposes his femme fatale “Pepper” with a series of his nudes.

Vast and intimate, gorgeous and sober, sensual and spare, the best of these photos explain Edward Weston’s place in the pantheon and the high bar he set for the photographers who followed.

Bottom line: A great opportunity to spend time with a master.

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