"day books" of Edward Weston

I think that so far, this is my favourite photo but I haven't seen enough for my liking yet so it can change but not so easily.... if you also want to see more, click here

I am sick today, how depressing and I thought i was unbreakable, sad realisation but I can't deny it since my nose now burns from blowing it way too many times and my head is all congested. Oh well, it will be gone in a few days and a winter isn't winter without it. Plus, it has been especially cold these last few days and so the combination of living in a fridge and only wearing thongs has revealed itself to be fatal......
On the other hand, and I should have been doing work instead, I have finished the "day books" of Edward Weston. Sadely, I hadn't realised that it was volume 2, on his California years and so I missed volume 1, in Mexico. That's annoying since he would have talked about Diego Rivera and Tina Modotti etc... probably not Frida since he only meets her in the California volume. I must say that it was especially exciting to read a random entry on her.... although he doesn't say much except that she is only little by the size and well, tell me something I didn't know...

In the midst of his quest for money without prostituting his art, and the inumerable mistresses, he also talks about photography, so although the other stuff is interesting and anecdotic, the photography parts are the most inspiring.
I think that what I have learned from him is that photography is a way of seeing and unlike other artists, Weston has not focused on what he sees but rather on how he sees it, therefore working with all kinds of subject matters ranging from vegetables, to nudes, portraits, landscapes, rocks etc.... with the same approach. I don't mean that all the photos are the same or that he was trying to express something common to all of them, but always, he tries to reveal the intrinsic beauty of nature, the shapes, the movement, the dynamism that is present in anything and everything if one can see it. One of the first things I learned in the landscape photography elective I took last summer (february in Sydney) is that a beautiful subject matter doesn't necesseraly make a beautiful photograph but what appears to be a banal subject can be revealed and sublimized by the skilled eye and a camera (or any other medium, although Weston only truly believes in the integrity of the camera). That idea of integrity, of recording reality as it is can obviously be discussed since it is after all guided by the human hand and before that the artist. It is the artist who choses the viewpoint, the type of lens, the film (colour, b+w etc...), and when the artist develops his own negatives, there opens a whole new realm of possibilities.
Nevertheless, Weston was aiming for perfection, or getting as close as possible to it. He took very long exposures (partly due to slow films at the time), with great depth of field (f.64) trying to record as much detail as available in the real thing, trying not to fall into the trap of expressing a mood, or an atmosphere or emphasizing one aspect more than the other. Sometimes, he added contrast with filters but most of the times, he tried to get the real tones. Basically, he tried to reveal the qualities inherent to the subject matter rather than creating an artificial representation of it using techniques like blur for example.
Again, his photographs are far from being boring and a mere recording of facts. They are often quite dramatic, abstract forms but they are not trying to force an interpretation this way or that way, they don’t have a message or a metaphorical meaning. They offer a new way of seeing, create interest and emotion because it is hard to believe that a pepper or knees can be seen like that and that nature can create such beauty if only one can look at it.