Exhibition captures the beauty of Brett Weston's 'Significant Details'

May 12, 2016 1:32 PM PT

The portrait of the artist as a dashing outdoorsman is the first image in “Brett Weston: Significant Details” exhibition at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. The undated photograph has the artist standing in profile with an 8x10 camera, shutter release in his right hand, at home amid rocky terrain in sunglasses and leather jacket.

“He cultivated a certain persona and bravado that he displayed to the world,” says Erin Aitali, PMCA Director of Exhibitions, and curator of the Weston show. “From everything that I’ve read, he was a very charming, warm man. He loved women, he loved cars. He wasn’t interested in politics or current events. He wasn’t interested in reading the newspaper. His number one thing was photography. Everything else was secondary to that.”

The opening portrait is followed by 42 photographs created by Weston that span a half-century of picture-making as one of the marquee names in a family of esteemed photographers. The family legacy began with the work of his hugely influential father, Edward Weston, but the younger photographer charted a distinctive career of his own, a modernist fascinated by the precision of “straight photography.”

“Significant Details” is on display at PMCA through Sept. 11, and is culled from the Brett Weston Archive, an entity separate from the Weston family devoted to collecting and promoting the late artist’s work. More than half of the pictures have never before been publicly shown.

“When I started digging in to what the Archive had, I was really impressed with the abstract works that he did and he had been doing those from the very beginning,” says Aitali.

Weston was born in Glendale and gravitated early to photography, though given only basic instruction in the use of large-format cameras. He developed a strong point of view and technical skills from his earliest pictures made while a teenager.

One photograph at PMCA from 1926, “The Roof, Mexico,” is a striking study of shadow and line, with deep blacks and subtle shades of gray across corrugated metal rooftops baking in the sun.

In his personal journal that year, his father wrote: “Brett is doing better work at 14 that I did at 30. To have someone close to me working so excellently, with an assured future, is a happiness hardly expected.”

In much of Brett Weston’s work, the focus is on the natural world, with no physical sign of the human form, which is especially true in “Significant Details.”

Extreme close-ups of familiar subjects are transformed into abstractions. Pictures of spiky succulents have a vaguely threatening, alien presence. Another called “Broken Glass” depicts the title subject in mysterious, liquid form, sprawling across the frame.

A pair of vivid images of sand dunes in Oceano, Calif. — dated from 1934 and 1954 — show his lasting interest in particular locations and subject matter. Other pictures are from travels to Europe, Baja and, in later years, Hawaii. “He returned to the places he liked multiple times over the decades,” says Aitali. “He really saw beauty in all the details, and he would keep going back to the same place and always see something different.”

Weston was a member (along with Ansel Adams and Edward Weston) of Group f/64, which turned away from the romantic pictorialism of the past in favor of a pure, factual view of the world. Weston became best known for his landscapes, which were commercially successful later in his career, but the smaller detailed images were more representative of his interests. “He did much more of these abstract details,” says Aitali.

In the late 1960s, a heart attack and lingering angina made it difficult to continue working with the bulky 8x10 camera, so he switched to the more portable 2-1/2 format and was immediately pleased with the new flexibility of the smaller equipment. Weston made headlines in 1991 when he made good on a promise to burn his negatives on his 80th birthday to prevent posthumous printing of his work. He destroyed 75 negatives of some of his most famous work that day, tossing each one into the fireplace.

That may have partly been a publicity stunt, and Weston made certain a photographer was present to document the act of violence toward his own work. It made a statement. A year before his death, it revealed an uncompromising commitment to preserving the pictures as he originally envisioned.

What: “Brett Weston: Significant Details”

Where: Pasadena Museum of California Art, 490 East Union St., Pasadena

When: Through Sept. 11.

More info: (626) 568-3665, pmcaonline.org

Steve Appleford, steve.appleford@latimes.com

Twitter: @SteveAppleford

Exhibition captures the beauty of Brett Weston’s ‘Significant Details’