Road scholar

Early in 1941, Edward Weston set off on a cross-country trip to take pictures for a limited-edition coffee-table book of Walt Whitman’s epic collection of poems “Leaves of Grass.” Weston had become the first photographer to win a Guggenheim grant in 1937 and was already regarded as a major American artist, but money was tight -- even for prestigious commissions. The publisher’s $500 advance had to last eight months, so Weston, 55, and his second wife, Charis Wilson, 27, crashed with friends of friends, camped out, and, in Louisiana, shared their $1-a-night motel room with giant cockroaches known locally as “ponies.”

Midway through the trip, Weston jotted a note to his publisher: “Feeling better after weeks of sad, cruel sacroiliac, heat, constipation and halitosis. First time I feel old. But I’ve worked hard, despite.”

From the outset, it was a very difficult trip, says Jennifer Watts, curator of photographs for the Huntington Library. “Weston and the publisher had very different visions of what the project should be and it only got worse as time progressed.” After motoring through 27 states, Weston and Wilson, nearly broke, returned to their home in Carmel, Calif. The book’s designer was fired, Weston was stiffed for his remaining fee, and the book was rushed into publication on green-tinted paper, a corny reference to Whitman’s title.

“The photographs look like paste-ins in a scrap album,” a disheartened Weston wrote to a friend. Despite the sour denouement, compounded by the deterioration of Weston’s marriage, which ended in 1945, the Whitman trip yielded a treasury of enduring images. Some are featured in “Edward Weston: A Legacy,” which runs through Oct. 5 at the Huntington Library’s Boone Gallery. The exhibition also includes notes and letters from ex-muse, ex-model, ex-wife Wilson, now 89, who lives in Santa Cruz. In all, “Legacy” showcases 150 photographs culled from the Huntington’s collection of 500 black-and-white prints that Weston selected and produced for the library between 1940 and 1944.

Getting his hands dirty

Weston is best known for the meticulously composed still lifes and nudes that he photographed in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s. “Legacy” includes some of those famous bell peppers and seashells. But a more expansive vision emerges from Weston’s on-the-road adventures, which began in the late ‘30s when the Guggenheim funded a series of 17 trips throughout California and the Western states.

“I think the Guggenheim [project] liberated Weston from these close-up views,” Watts says. “He began to move away from the tightly controlled image that you’d see in the studio setting. In the landscapes, he’s pulling the camera back and showing things a little messier.”

In response to the vivid sense of place that inspired so many of Weston’s pictures, Watts decided to organize the show according to the locales that inspired so many of Weston’s pictures. Referring to the wild coastal region near Carmel that provided Weston with a rich lode of nature subjects, Watts says, “Point Lobos was Weston’s spiritual home, but Death Valley became a powerful muse. He went back three times in two years because he felt so much could be gleaned from the landscape, the otherworldly quality, the incredible forms that he would encounter there.”

Pausing in front of a picture titled “Dead Man, Colorado Desert 1937,” Watts says, “He and Charis saw a little sign in the desert: ‘Help, I need water, I’m sick,’ and then they found this man who had already expired. Instead of running off and telling the authorities, Weston set up his tripod and took pictures. People say he fixated on dead things, but his retort was, ‘Well, death is part of life.’ ”

Also evident is Weston’s affinity for kelp, sand dunes, cypress trees, jawbones, rivers and other organic forms. Given his deep connection to nature, it’s not surprising that Weston became close friends with the era’s foremost wilderness photographer, Ansel Adams. They trekked through Adams’ beloved Yosemite and visited Death Valley together three times. But Watts points out that Weston framed his landscapes in a manner completely distinct from Adams’. “Weston was determined to make his own imagery and not fall into the visual stereotypes,” Watts says, pointing to a series of ice-crusted lakes and rock formation landscapes that resemble Abstract Expressionist paintings. “These images distanced Weston’s work from Adams because Weston put such a strong emphasis on form and texture; Adams was pulling back and showing something grandiose in his landscapes. Weston was quieter.”

In 1932, Weston and Adams started Group f/64, a loose-knit collective of San Francisco-area photographers who’d had enough of the soft-focus sentimentalism favored by the Pictoralist school then in vogue. The modern aesthetic of f/64, named after the camera aperture that ensures the greatest degree of image resolution, valued a stripped-down brand of “straight photography” that would draw its strength from precision, detail and sharp focus.

Weston, in short, was a purist. “He didn’t crop, he didn’t retouch. What you see is printed directly from the 8-by-10 negative,” Watts says. “Weston was very much of the view that you didn’t take multiple shots. He spent a lot of time looking, setting up the camera exactly how he wanted it. He rarely took more than one or two [shots] of the same thing.”

The photographer called his process “pre-visualization,” says Jonathan Spaulding, associate curator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, who consulted on the “Legacy” exhibit. “He imagined what each print would look like at the time of exposure, and each step of the whole process was about transforming that mental image into a physical presence.”

Not a social chronicle

Though Weston stressed precise, gimmick-free objectivity in his work, he resisted being pigeonholed as a creator of mere documents. Watts says that unlike his friend Dorothea Lange, the period’s foremost social documentarian, Weston had no interest in chronicling the plight of Depression-era Americans. “Weston very much wanted to get away from the idea that [the Guggenheim venture] was any kind of historical documentary project,” she says. “He took a lot of flak for it among his peers, who felt he shouldn’t be off photographing rocks and trees -- he should be showing destitution and poverty in the cities. “When he received the Guggenheim grant, they refer to the project as documents of California and the West, and he wanted them to remove that word. Weston was very political in his own way but felt his work had as much significance as what Dorothea Lange was doing. Certainly the tenor of the times comes through in his work.”

Spaulding adds, “Weston was not a socially committed photographer who wanted to awaken people to the plight of migrant workers and what have you. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t aware of what was going on in the world and remarking on it, reacting to it, interpreting it.”

Indeed, Weston let the detritus he came across in his travels speak for itself. Images of a rusted car abandoned by the side of the road, an empty can of beans in the desert dust lying next to a beat-up old boot, a makeshift black church all contribute muted commentary on the national mood. But a picture’s formal qualities always came first. “Weston’s whole approach with still lifes and landscapes was to find the very essence of nature and boil it down to form and light and shadow,” Watts says. In his studio work, “he’d put the camera on a stand, and if a truck went by and jostled it, that would ruin the shot. He may have taken up to five days to get the shot itself, and then he would often spend an entire day in the darkroom until he got the print exactly the way he wanted.” Weston often created a number of test prints, varying exposures until he achieved the exact tonal gradations he was after.

By the time he embarked on his Whitman assignment in search of “Faces and Places of America,” Weston broadened his scope to encompass cities, factories, buildings and people. “It’s very different from what he’s best known for,” Watts says. “It includes a lot of people, and he was really captivated by certain places, like New Orleans, where he found the cemeteries to be particularly rich material.”

The Whitman material sheds new light on Weston’s talents as a portrait photographer. When he received the Guggenheim money, Weston gladly phased out the portraiture business, which paid the bills for his wife and four children during the early ‘30s. But now Weston had the freedom to pick and pose his own subjects. In Nashville, he spent an afternoon with tombstone carver William Edmundson, who would go on to become the first black sculptor to receive a solo show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Weston’s stark portraits of a Kentucky labor organizer, a Yaqui Indian and an elderly Texas couple gave his publisher “a fright” but today seem well suited to Whitman’s democratic breadth of vision.

On his 1941 journey, Weston’s talent for finding the singular image led him to smokestacks in Ohio, barns in Maine and, most strikingly, a Texas oil refinery. On a scorching hot day, he found shots that somehow transmuted prosaic drilling equipment into images every bit as alien as a “War of the Worlds” spaceship. “Weston really wanted the Whitman trip [material] to stand on its own artistic merits,” Watts says, “and I think it’s some of the strongest work that we have.”

Spaulding calls Weston “one of the few fundamental modernist photographers whom every contemporary photographer deals with and absorbs and reacts to. Everybody’s influenced by Weston -- from Robert Mapplethorpe to the latest advertising photographer. He sort of freed up the medium in the sense that everything was fair game for the camera, whether it was a commonplace household object or an urban scene.

“He was particularly influential with contemporary landscape photographers who deal with the human presence in the landscape. Rather than the dichotomy of the pristine untouched wilderness, his landscape was an inhabited landscape. You could argue that approach has become very prominent in contemporary landscape photography.”

The Huntington archive is especially important, scholars say, because after Weston printed his final selections for the library in 1944, his skills in the darkroom were compromised by the onset of Parkinson’s disease. From the late ‘40s until his death in 1958, Weston rarely printed his own work.

“The bulk of existing prints that are out there were printed by Weston’s sons, either Brett or Cole, but Weston himself was a master printer. There’s a richness without harshness and a kind of luminosity to his prints.” Watts says. And finding pristine subject matter required a Zen-like inner eye, according to Amy Conger, author of “Edward Weston: Mexico.”

“Weston saw very intensely,” she says. “In his prints, what he aimed for were these stunning gradations.... He was a very patient man. I think both Ansel and Edward were masters of waiting -- waiting for it to happen, waiting for this thing to happen, waiting to see what they wanted to see. And if it didn’t come now, they’d go on, because there’d always be something else.”

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‘Edward Weston: A Legacy’

Where: Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino

When: Tuesdays-Sundays, 10:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m.

Ends: Oct. 5

Price: $4-$10; 4 and younger, free please cq, this info differs from what’s on the recorded message

Contact: (626) 405-2141