“The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.”
These are the words of Edward Weston, the great photographer whose work is the subject of a large retrospective featuring 100 photographs from the 1920s to the 1940s, most of which come from the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, which houses the largest Weston archives in the world.
Edward Weston was the first photographer to apply for and receive the Guggenheim Fellowship for experimental art. In his photographs, abstraction and realism blend together in a way that reflects his biography: an interest in modern art (a visit to a San Francisco exhibition devoted to Cubism is considered a defining moment in the development of his work); his meetings with Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand and Geogria O’Keefe in New York, in 1922; his Mexican period, from 1923 to 1926, with Tina Modotti, Diego Rivera, David Siquerios and José Orozco; the creation of the group f/64 with Imogen Cunningham, Ansel Adams, Willard Van Dyke, Jean-Paul Edwards and Sonya Noskowiak in 1932, and so on.
Modernity can be seen throughout Weston’s oeuvre, as in his nudes where the body loses almost all of its materiality to become pure form. His photographs are perfect down to the smallest detail (as per the rules of the group f/64), and are transformed in the mind of the spectator into wonderful sculptures.
Weston’s varied and complex artistic career came to end in 1946 due to Parkinson’s disease. He took his final photograph in 1948.
Laura Incardona
Edward Weston. Une rétrospective
Until December 9th 2012
ex Ospedale Sant’Agostino
Largo Porta Sant’Agostino 228
41100 Modena – Italy
From December 16th 2012 to February 17th 2013
au Centre italien pour l’Art contemporain
06034 Foligno – Italy
