©Brett Weston

 

(1911-1993)

In 1925, long before photography was accepted as a ‘legitimate’ art form, Brett Weston embarked upon a remarkable career in fine art photography that would span more than 65 years. That year, he began his legendary abstraction of form in Mexico under the astonished eye of his father, the great photographer Edward Weston, who often privately credited Brett with influencing his own work after that date. Brett had been gifted with a photographic ‘eye’ that is recognizable from his earliest work. Edward Weston observed that at age fourteen Brett was doing better work than he was doing himself at thirty. In time, they would become photographic colleagues, with Brett not only at the wheel during camera trips (Edward never learned to drive) but also encouraging Edward to shed the older platinum papers in favor of richer tones available in silver halide and doing much of their joint studio darkroom work. By age twenty Brett’s work was being exhibited internationally and the world had a glimpse of what was to come. The Curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Van Deren Coke would later state, "Brett Weston was the child genius of American photography."

Brett Weston’s work would ultimately become one of the defining pillars of contemporary photography with its technical precision, bold design and extremes of abstraction and private imagination. The excitement and tension in his prints were Brett’s unique response to pure from the vocabulary of line, volume, pattern, and light and dark. It was this sensual response to form that defines his more classical European landscapes, taken in the 1960’s and 70’s. A world away from the endless California horizons and soaring cliffs, these scenes from abroad feature beautifully modulated light and confined landscapes born from Weston’s expert technical command of the West Coast tradition of photography.

In Weston’s concluding photographs taken during the 1980’s, the abstract was resurrected but this time the playful and less orderly images of writhing reflections in skyscraper windows and the electrifying patterns of light on underwater figures captured his imagination. A final series of plant forms in Hawaii revealed a more mature language; as a sense of mortality and introspection entered the frame. It was as if Weston had begun to contemplate the limits of the ego, or of reason, still affirming the self, but with more awareness of death and chaos. True to only himself, these images are often punctuated with elements of humor and more irrational elements of design. His lifetime of devotion and total involvement with the medium produced a body of work and contribution to photography that transcends comparisons to his father and has few equals in contemporary photography.