Depth perception

When Edward Weston became the first photographer to receive a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, in 1937, he was already one of the most famous artists working in America. But that didn’t mean he could make financial ends meet through his art. Partly the Great Depression was at fault, but mostly the general indifference of Americans toward art was to blame. Weston, then 51, needed the Guggenheim fellowship -- not to survive (he made his living as a commercial portrait photographer), but to work full time as an artist.

He used the $2,000 grant (almost $25,000 in today’s currency) to finance numerous photo trips around California and the West. In the Boone Gallery at San Marino’s Huntington Library, a lush exhibition of some 150 black-and-white prints shows the magnificence of what he accomplished. This is only the third time the Huntington has shown examples from its great Weston collection, and it’s the first time a major publication has been produced.

The Guggenheim Foundation had extended Weston’s grant for a second year, mostly so he could print from the nearly 1,000 negatives he had made, and by the time he was finished he began to consider ways to preserve his new endeavor as a coherent body of work. The Guggenheim’s director suggested the Huntington Library as an ideal repository, and after some negotiation, a deal was struck. Weston spent the years of World War II in the darkroom at his small cabin near Carmel printing 500 images for the Huntington -- making this a definitive statement by a major American artist.

Landscapes dominate the show. After an introductory room of classic still-life pictures -- the sensuous radishes, cabbages, peppers and seashells of the 1920s and ‘30s -- the exhibition becomes a Grand Tour of natural wonders, large and small. Pictures are grouped geographically, including Death Valley, Point Lobos, Yosemite and Hollywood’s studio back lots.

People are almost never encountered. It’s as if, freed from the commercial restraints of his bread-and-butter work as a portraitist, the last thing Weston wanted to see when he peered through his camera’s lens was another person looking back. Sand dunes, cloud patterns, gnarled junipers, kelp, melting ice, weathered rock, tomato fields, snoozing cattle, snow-covered peaks -- nature is the subject of most of these photographs.

Saying so can be misleading, though, for nature’s essence is not what Weston’s art seeks to capture. Instead, his genius lies in the manipulation of the mechanics of perception. Weston’s work is powerful because it crystallizes the essence of camera vision -- what it looks like, how it plays with light, what it does to the normal scanning process with which the human eye has always taken in the shifting contours of the world, what it can accomplish when fixed on a piece of paper.

Take his 1938 picture “Badwater, Death Valley,” where the near-silhouette of a desolate ridge beneath a cloud-streaked sky is reflected in a still pool of water. Richly printed, the photograph seems to contain every imaginable shade of gray in that wide-open territory between jet black and icy white. Weston’s composition emphasizes a horizontal scan, while the pristine reflection of the landscape in the water unfolds vertically. Mountains in the far distance are as crisply focused as the dirt and scrub along the water’s edge. The result is a stunning sight the human eye could never see on its own in the landscape.

Weston famously used the limitations of the camera as a means of creative resistance. Less than 10 inches wide, the Badwater picture is filled with the peculiar emptiness of the desert, where vast expanses play havoc with ordinary perceptual experiences of scale and the cosmos is intimated in a grain of sand. The scene seems to wobble in space and time. What better effect could there be to encapsulate an ancient, otherworldly site like Death Valley?

None of that was of any interest when he made his first photograph at age 17, exactly 100 years ago. Then, the governing approach to serious work was to use the camera and the darkroom to make photographs mimic paintings. Pictorialism, as the reigning photographic style was called, emphasized the familiar look of art -- and it did so for a reason.

Self-conscious references to art were a way to deny the charge that a camera was merely a mechanical recording device.

It was also a way for a photographer to claim the artist’s mantle. Pictorialism had its charms, but it suffered a kind of aesthetic me-too-ism. Like a social climber fixated on his inadequacies, unable to escape a pretentious aura of envy-driven masquerade, the style was trapped in a cycle of endless striving. As Pictorialist photographers lusted after the legitimacy of established art, inevitably it eluded them.

In 1920 Weston abandoned the pursuit. Rather than a backhanded confession of what camera vision could never be -- namely, an aesthetic fiction virtually the same as painting -- his work began to examine what camera vision actually was. When Weston spoke of the demand for “truth” and “honesty” in photography, it was the false pretense of me-too-ism he meant to banish. His photographs lusted instead after modern life. The approach disregarded artistic legitimacy, which almost made it modern by default.

Born in Illinois, Weston came to California at 20. He settled first in downtown Los Angeles, then opened a studio in the sunny suburb of Tropico (today’s Glendale). Californian to the core, he cared little for established hierarchies or entrenched social conventions. “Who you are and how much money you have is of secondary importance here,” he later wrote on his Guggenheim application.

Weston was not the only American photographer to give up Pictorialism, nor was he the first. But he was among the most rigorous and perceptive.

He came to understand that if the solution to the problem of photography was not to be found in painting, neither would it be found in a correct social attitude or in theoretical propositions about art. Instead, the solution would be found inside the camera.

For the Machine Age, the camera was the artistic point of convergence in modern life. As an artist, Weston would find his answer there, on the lens where light gathered and was focused from edge to edge into a crisp pattern of silvery shadows.

The real test of a photographer, Weston famously wrote to a friend in 1922, was in “the ability to see one’s finished print on the ground glass in all its desired qualities and values before exposure.” The elegant precision of the image on the glass would not mimic painting but would reflect qualities inherent in the machine. Weston’s art told the truth of camera vision, his photographs negotiating an acute rapprochement between man and machine.

The Huntington exhibition, handsomely organized by curator Jennifer Watts, concludes with a small surprise. Eighteen lovely pictures from a suite of 49 commissioned to illustrate a limited edition of Walt Whitman’s great lyric poem, “Leaves of Grass,” are on view. Given their bad reputation, the surprise is how good they are.

Weston got the commission in 1941, when he was busy printing works for the Huntington collection, and he set off on an eight-month odyssey around the country taking pictures. He regarded the book that resulted as a fiasco -- thanks to an awkward design, a mediocre printing job and a bizarre decision by the publisher to use Whitman’s lines of poetry as captions for Weston’s photographs. Joining, for example, a picture of a country banjo player with the first lines of “I Hear America Singing” is even cornier than Kansas. No wonder Weston was annoyed.

He made his reputation, after all, by showing how foolish it was to make photographs mimic paintings. Making them a literal depiction of verse was hardly something he would do. In the excellent catalog that accompanies the show, former Huntington curator Susan Danly makes a persuasive argument that Weston actually produced a “vision of America” that is visually poetic, literary in spirit but not fact. The pictures bear her out.

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‘Edward Weston: A Legacy’

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

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

Ends: Oct. 5

Price: Adults, $12.50; seniors, $10; students, $8.50.

Contact: (626) 405-2100