“The camera for an artist is just another tool. It is no more mechanical than a violin if you analyze it. Beyond the rudiments, it is up to the artist to create art, not the camera.” -Brett Weston
Son of Edward
Brett Weston is photographer Edward Weston’s second son and the one who started walking his father’s path before veering into his own vision of making pictures. When he was 13 he went to Mexico with his father to assist in his work along with the photographer Tina Modotti. There he started taking pictures with his father’s Graphic camera that produced negative 3 1/4 by 4 1/4 inches. He met and viewed the work of revolutionary artists like José Coemente Orozco, Jean Charlot and Diego Rivera. Exposure to these artists and others led Brett to develop a strong sense of design.
Brett Weston
Brett Weston called abstract artist Georgia O’Keeffe the greatest American painter. He greatly admired Paul Strand, Henri Cartier-Bresson. He and his father were members of the f/64 Group along with Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham and others. Brett did not much like the discussions. “My work is my language and I don’t discuss it very easily,” he said. “It’s difficult for me to verbalize my feelings, or to intellectualize my work. In fact, it used to annoy me when Ansel Adams and Paul Strand yak-yak-yakked about what photography meant, and I told them so.”
His work showed he had a natural ability to translate what he saw into meaningful photographs. Two years later, in 1927, he began exhibiting his work alongside his father’s. Eighteen of his photos were featured in an international exhibition in Germany called “Film und Foto” considered to be the most important avant-garde exhibition to be held between World War I and World War II. He was 17. By age 21 he had his first solo exhibition at the De Young Museum in San Francisco.
Abstractions
Brett’s early work showed he had an eye for abstractions that were influenced not only by the artists he knew but also by the tonality of black and white film that reduced and disguised the actual subject. A Ford Tri-Motor airplane, arches in Germany and a close-up of a steam locomotive (opening photo, top row) are examples.
Brett produced his first portfolio of photographs in 1938, in which he assembled sets of his work for sale. He created 14 portfolios during his lifetime. Each portfolio held 10 to 20 prints.
Brett Weston’s work
From 1950 to 1980, his vision evolved into bold abstract photographs. His subjects were often close-ups of nature — tangled kelp, bamboo (opening photo, bottom row, third image) and plant leaves that he could represent in simple graphic forms.
Richard Pitnick’s article “The Masterful and Messy Legacy of Brett Weston” quotes Brett Weston as saying, “I love appreciation and an audience, we all do, but I don’t photograph for anybody but myself. In general, mass audiences are tasteless, and I’d rather have an audience of say a thousand people who really love and understand and appreciate my work than 10 million.”
Brett Weston and the art boom
The art scene grew to recognize photography as a collectible medium during the 1970s and 1980s. Brett Weston did well during these times, achieving significant wealth. His best-known prints brought $5000 each, while book contracts and reproductions brought him hundreds of thousands of dollars more.
By the time he died in 1993 at age 81, Brett Weston’s estate was worth over $2 million. It had an archive of 30,000 photographs, including 1,400 fine prints, all printed by Brett himself during his 70-year career. Many of them have never been seen.
Destroyed negatives
Brett Weston assured the authenticity and the integrity of his archive by destroying almost 7,000 of his negatives. He donated 12 negatives to the Center for Creative Photography and another dozen to his son Cole. Both sets had damage that would not allow fine prints to be made. This singular act has made his archive priceless.
Sources: Center for Creative Photography, New York Times Magazine, Monterey County Weekly.
