It’s often said that Brett Weston was the child prodigy of American photography. Certainly, the fourth son of Edward Weston knew how to handle subjects and styles as brilliantly as his father. In 1925, when Brett was thirteen, he left school to join his father in Mexico and learned the intricacies of formalism. Brett’s work was marked by a taste for minimalism, and somewhat less psychology. But the comparisons with his father stop here. For fifty years, Brett Weston was a dedicated and prolific artist. We cannot begin to count the exhibitions and publications of his large-format photographs that stand out for their lyricism and poetry.
Eighty of his photographs, all in black and white, are on view at the Steven Kasher gallery in New York. The exhibition is a journey through the wide open spaces of California, Mexico, Alaska, Hawaii and the Sierra Nevada mountains in the western United States, as well as more narrow spaces in New York and small European cities. Like many photographers, Brett Weston had already understood that light is fundamental to a photograph’s success. He seeks light out and tames it a little bit everywhere, personifying it as it flirts with sandy hot dunes plants and trees, rocks and other man-made structures.
His intuitive, sophisticated sense of abstraction makes him closer to modern expressionist painters like David Hockney than other photographers. Weston’s other obsession was women, and they got the better of his sensibility. He photographed them nude, with a respect for the body and a gentleness of vision to silence the genre’s detractors. This is the first Brett Weston exhibition in New York in fifteen years, and one of only two retrospectives in the past thirty-five. This delay is perhaps due to the long journey the photos had to make from where they were taken, far from civilization.
Jonas Cuénin
Brett Weston
Until November 3rd, 2012
Steven Kasher Gallery
521 West 23rd St #2R
New York, NY 10011
(212) 966-3978
