ART REVIEW : Weston Photos Still Flash With Passion

Some art exhibitions are like visits to an old friend’s house. You already know what you’ll experience there; it’s the process of reacquaintance that counts.

“Supreme Instants: The Photography of Edward Weston” is a traveling show parked at the County Museum of Art until Sept. 4. With more than 200 prints, it is billed as the largest, most comprehensive show ever for Weston.

Viewers will rush to see the famous stuff: the shells and peppers with the erotic fullness of nudes; the nude with the impersonal curves and hollows of a piece of fruit; the toilet bowl with the harmonious lines of ancient statuary; the long parade of exquisitely toned images of sand dunes and rocks and driftwood and cypresses.

And yet, no matter how many times you look at these photographs, they still retain the tang of passion and discovery.

Born in 1886 in Highland Park, Ill., Weston was a California transplant who began his professional life as a portrait photographer, catering to the crotchets of middle-class sitters.

But the work he produced in his precious free time was very different. In the late teens and early ‘20s he photographed friends posing in attics, where the play of walls, sun and shadow lent his subjects an arty glamour.

Oddly, in view of Weston’s colorful and well-documented life, the exhibit, organized by the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson, tends to downplay the biographical elements in his work.

A 1920 photograph of Margarethe Mather, his model, pupil, business partner and friend, peering from under a broad-brimmed hat next to the pale, graceful shadow of a tree, is given only its romantic title, “Prologue to a Sad Spring.”

Nudes are similarly unidentified, though the sitters were often Weston’s intimates or good friends. A skirt-chasing sensualist in his private life, Weston was a photographic puritan, insisting that his images were the product of abstract vision.

In fact, most of the figurative images are surprisingly relaxed in their inclusion of extraneous elements or human imperfections--the edge of the model’s chin, the distracting lines of furniture, the fine tracery of veins on a breast, a spattering of freckles.

Even a famous porcelain toilet reveals a fraction of an inch of its wooden top, a fact that infuriated the photographer, who blamed his “haste--carelessness--stupidity.”

Weston wrestled with the question of whether it was OK to retouch such blunders. He decided it wasn’t.

During the mid-’20s he had temporarily escaped babbittry, marriage and the commercial grind of his Glendale studio to live the expatriate’s life in Mexico. There he decisively traded in his soft-focus pictorialist style for an obsession with the exact.

But his big subject was the natural world.

The earliest image in the show, a photo the 18-year-old Weston took in 1904 with his secondhand 5-by-7 camera, is a platinum print of Lake Michigan, with angled curls of foam breaking the severity of the high, unbroken horizon.

Back in California after his Mexican adventure, he was smitten by the seductive curves and subtle, nacreous glow of seashells, which he photographed indoors under a skylight using exposures as long as 4 1/2 hours.

His absorption in the mysterious, willful shapes of vegetables--the skirt-like drape of cabbage leaf, the ruffled whorls of kale, the knobby polished surfaces and dark recesses of a cabbage--followed later.

Settled in Carmel in 1929, Weston discovered the Point Lobos peninsula, a wildlife preserve. And so began the fascination with the textures of natural things cast up on the sand. Today, after countless reinterpretations of such themes, it’s easy to take these prints for granted. But they remain technical marvels sprung from a great pantheistic urgency that Weston captured by dint of excruciating patience and exactitude.

It’s too bad the exhibit doesn’t contain some of the very dark black-and-white photographs he made during his last years behind the viewfinder. The velvety, magisterial presence of these images seems fitting as the final revelations of an artist intensely involved with the essences of living things.

The Ektachromes Weston took in 1946 and ‘47, when Eastman Kodak Co. proposed that he try shooting in color, hardly make up for this omission with their disappointingly banal treatment of subjects so keenly perceived in black and white.

(It should be noted that the color prints in the exhibition are in fact Cibachromes of the original slides, produced a few years ago at the Center for Creative Photography under the supervision of Weston’s youngest son, Cole. The black-and-white photographs, on the other hand, are vintage, except for a very few from a group processed in the early ‘50s by Weston’s son Brett.

The exhibition’s organizers and the museum are seriously remiss in failing to offer this information--basic knowledge any photography buff wants to know--in the catalogue or on the wall labels in the galleries.

In any case, by the time Weston discovered color, Parkinson’s disease was already invading his system, ending his photography career. Despite major exhibitions of his work--and the support of loyal friends--his last years were sad and lonely. Weston died at home in Carmel on New Year’s Day, 1958.