Prints and Drawings Room
View by appointment- Artist
- Brett Weston 1911–1993
- Medium
- Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
- Dimensions
- Image: 312 × 274 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Presented by Tate Americas Foundation, courtesy of Christian Keesee Collection 2013, accessioned 2021
- Reference
- P15393
Summary
This is one of a group of 98 black and white gelatin silver photographs were taken by Brett Weston over his sixty-year career and represent an overview of his lifelong practice. The group contains both vintage and more recent prints; all of them were printed by the artist during his lifetime. Towards the end of his life, Weston famously burnt and destroyed the majority of his negatives so that no prints could be made after his death. The titles Weston used for his works are often straightforward and descriptive, usually describing the object depicted, for example Mud Cracks 1955 (Tate P15318); sometimes the location is also included, as in Rooftops, New York 1946 (Tate P15319). This group is representative of the broad categories into which Weston’s work falls – landscape, the urban environment, and abstraction. Although Weston often thought of his work in terms of these broad themes, he also divided his work into portfolios, selecting what he considered to be the best images from a certain period. His first portfolio San Francisco was completed in 1937, followed by several others including White Sands 1949 and Japan 1970.
Weston’s work shows a great interest in, and sensitivity to, questions of composition and form. He made numerous studies of nature, such as Botanical c.1980 (Tate P15363) or Ferns, Hawaii c.1980 (Tate P15365), which depict close-up images of foliage and organic forms, acknowledging the legacy of pre-war European photographers such as Karl Blossfeldt (1865–1932). These close-up cropped images of organic forms which continue beyond the edge of the frame give the impression of the flow and continuity of the landscape, suggesting that the whole object both begins and ends outside the frame of the image. From the 1950s to the 1970s Weston became interested in the relationship between the photographic image and abstraction. Cracked Paint c.1970 (Tate P15367) is, as the title suggests, a close-up composition of cracked paint peeling away from a wall which results in an abstracted image. Weston’s abstract studies made during this period are very graphic in style, accentuated through his preference for high contrast prints with a strong black and white opposition. In the late 1970s and 1980s, Weston returned to a broader landscape practice. Having recently settled in Hawaii, he stated, ‘I have found in this environment, everything I could want to interpret about the world photographically’ (‘About’, Brett Weston Archive, https://www.brettwestonarchive.com/about-brett-weston/, accessed 1 September 2012).
Weston’s work was exhibited in several ground breaking exhibitions including Film und Foto, Stuttgart, Germany in 1929 and Group f.64, San Francisco in 1932, both recognised as two of the most important photography exhibitions of the interwar period in Europe and America.
Further reading
Van Deren Coke, Brett Weston, Photographs: 1925–1930 and 1980–1982, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 1983.
Stephen Bennett Phillips, Brett Weston, Out of the Shadows, exhibition catalogue, Oklahoma City Museum of Art, The Phillips Collection 2008.
Shoair Mavlian
October 2012
Arthur Goodwin
January 2017
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