Lust in Translation

John Vettese sees what develops

by John Vettese

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Published: Feb 16, 2010

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Aged and succumbing to Parkinson's disease, Edward Weston set up his camera on the rocky California coast in 1948 and framed up his final photographs.

This study of Monterey's Point Lobos resulted in an image he subtitled Something Out of Nothing. It hangs in a quiet corner of the Michener Museum's Della Penna-Fernberger Gallery as part of "Life Work," a retrospective of this master of 20th-century photography. Examining the print in the context of those surrounding it, its name seems terribly misplaced. It shows dark rocks, scattered haphazardly on the sand and loosely framed. There's no order, the scene is not composed in an evocative manner; it's nothing, not something.

Weston rarely employed titles that went beyond literal descriptions; perhaps he had saved this one for years, ultimately deciding to sling it on one of his final works, whether or not it fit. But Something Out of Nothing seems a more apt description of his oeuvre than this particular print.

Throughout "Life Work" we see photographs working on dual levels — as an image of the object itself, and as an image of what else the object appears to be. His nudes resemble landscapes and fruits, while his still lifes resemble nudes. The work is rich in subliminal subtext, and one wonders what Freud might have said about Weston.

An armchair analysis: His attempts to be a family man conflicted with his, er, problems with monogamy. The biographical notes accompanying the exhibit cite three major mistresses in addition to his two wives. And that's before you get to the room displaying his famous nude photographs, read "most models were also his lovers" and then find another dozen names in their titles. As Geoff Dyer put it in his 2005 book The Ongoing Moment, "He was one of those men who, as they say, got more ass than a toilet seat."

Dyer goes on to point out that Weston famously photographed toilet seats; you can see one at the Michener, its white porcelain emerging from the dark wall surrounding it like a leg emerging from the high-cut slit of a sexy cocktail dress.

An adjoining wall is dedicated almost entirely to Weston's studies of peppers. The photographer left them to air out and wither, and captured the humanistic shapes they created. Pepper No. 30 suggests a back and rib cage, with arms raised behind a head. Pepper No. 35 (pictured, p. 18) could be the bends of two spooning bodies. Were there any doubt at what Weston was getting at here, a quote has him talking of "cannibalizing my subjects" in reference to cooking and eating the peppers once they exceeded their useful photographic life.

Nature is shot in the same manner. The shades and shapes he saw in the sand dunes of Death Valley and the central California coast were markedly feminine, with bluffs becoming breasts and ridges becoming a spine. Dunes, Oceano, 1936 looks like a body in repose, its hair draped downward.

The exhibit notes try to class this work up by referring to its "sensuality." I say it's plainly and unapologetically erotic. But while these object studies are done with the air of a horny dude channeling his libido into art — beautifully so, but still — he seems surprisingly reserved once he actually gets in a room with his unclothed human subjects.

Enough of them are indeed full-figure (including the famous shots of second wife Charis Wilson, sprawled and probably scalding herself on the sands of the New Mexico desert), but many are abstracted so tightly that they no longer seem human.

Nude, Miriam Lerner, 1925 is a profile view of a woman's back and buttocks, her back-lit body arching upward to look like a sunset silhouetting sloping hills.

The lighting plays an even more pronounced role in Nude 143N, Gretchen, which is so closely cropped and shaded, it could be one of his dune landscapes.

And his still lifes are recalled in Anita (Pear Shaped Nude), where a woman leans forward, her legs and arms clasped so tightly to her body that all we see are her shoulders and torso, a mass of white in the shape of a fruit.

If we're to project a narrative onto the images in "Life Work," it's of a man uncomfortable in either side of his life. One half — Weston the husband and father — felt constrained by a commonplace existence, and saw in his nothings, desirous somethings. And the other — Weston the philanderer — felt remorse for his lusty ways, and sought to disconnect from his id's behavior by transforming it into something else.

(j_vettese@citypaper.net)

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