Cat portraits by Edward Weston
Category: Edward Weston, Edward Henry Weston
The family of cats by Edward Weston
Pictorialist portrait by Weston
Mather with cyclamen blossom
Betty in her attic by Weston
This particular photograph is part portrait and part compositional experiment with Weston’s growing interest in the formal concerns of Modernism. Katz is shown sitting in a niche where a network of large intersecting planes made up of the attic’s floor, walls, and dormers and articulated in varying shades by light entering from an unseen window on the right.
This particular photograph is Pictorialist in its soft focus and compositional arrangement. However, it is also Modernist in its self-conscious use of space and form as subjects of the photograph. Weston subordinated Katz’s figure to the graphic abstraction of the large rectangles that she appears to hold up. The print’s muted tones flatten the image’s depth, reducing the room to a two-dimensional space.
A critic for Pictorial Photography, wrote about this image: “Queerness for its own sake must have obsessed Edward Weston when he recorded the stiff and angular lines in Betty in Her Attic . . . , although there is no denying the truth and beauty of tones of the floors and walls. But the position of the girl!—is there not a touch of cussedness in that?”
This particular photograph is part portrait and part compositional experiment with Weston’s growing interest in the formal concerns of Modernism. Katz is shown tucked into a network of large intersecting planes made up of the attic’s floor, walls, and dormers and articulated in varying shades by light entering from an unseen window on the left.
This particular photograph is part portrait and part compositional experiment with Weston’s growing interest in the formal concerns of Modernism. Katz is shown tucked into a network of large intersecting planes made up of the attic’s floor, walls, and dormers and articulated in varying shades by light entering from an unseen window on the right.
In 1920 Edward Weston began a creative series of pictures made in his friends’ attics. Reactions to these images were mixed. Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976), one of Weston’s friends and fellow photographers, wrote glowingly of one in a letter addressed to him, “It has Paul Strand’s eccentric efforts, so far as I have seen them, put entirely to shame, because it is more than eccentric. It has all the cubistically inclined photographers laid low. It is a most pleasing thing for the mind to dwell on, the mind I say and mean, not the emotions or fancies. It is literal in a most beautiful and intellectual way.”
The woman pictured is Betty Katz (later Brandner, 1895-1982), who was introduced to Weston by his colleague Margrethe Mather (1886-1952). Weston and Katz engaged in a brief affair in October 1920, when he made several other images of her in her attic and out on a balcony.
Text adapted from Brett Abbott. Edward Weston, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum [All quotes from this post retrieved from Getty museum]
also, NMAH Smithsonian institution
Betty Katz in balcony by Weston
The woman pictured is Betty Katz (later Brandner, 1895-1982), who was introduced to Weston by his colleague Margrethe Mather (1886-1952). Weston and Katz engaged in a brief affair in October 1920, when he made several other images of her in her attic and this image—out on a balcony. This particular photograph is Pictorialist in its soft focus and compositional arrangement. However, the prominent attention given the repeating cut forms of the balustrade, the post’s round finial, and the varied angles that frame the image point to Weston’s growing interest in the formal concerns in Modernism.
Dancer by Edward Weston
Undulating Sand by Weston
Alinari monograph on Weston
Modotti by Weston, 1921
This photograph is among the earliest studies Edward Weston made of Tina Modotti, the woman whose face and figure would inspire some of Weston’s best work throughout the 1920s. The photographer regarded the image as an important one at the time, including it in two early exhibitions: in Amsterdam in 1922, and at the Aztec Land Gallery in Mexico City in 1923. This print is one of only three extant examples of this seminal picture of Modotti.
Head of an Italian Girl is from a series of studies and portraits of Modotti that Weston began in Los Angeles in 1921, soon after their love affair began, and would continue in Mexico. At the time this photograph was taken, each was married to someone else: Weston to the former Flora Chandler, the mother of his four children, and Modotti to the poet and textile designer, Roubaix de l’Abrie Richey. Born in Italy, Modotti was a recent arrival in Los Angeles, where she worked variously as an actress in silent films and as a seamstress and clothing designer. In the early 1920s, Weston made his living as a portrait photographer in Glendale, while pursuing his own creative work. The two fell in love shortly after they met, and Weston began photographing Modotti immediately. In April 1921, Weston wrote of Modotti to his friend, the photographer Johan Hagemeyer:
‘Life has been very full for me—perhaps too full for my good—I not only have done some of the best things yet—but have also had an exquisite affair . . . the pictures I believe to be especially good are of one Tina de Richey—a lovely Italian girl’ (The Archive, January 1986, Number 22, ‘The Letters from Tina Modotti to Edward Weston,’ p. 10)
In the present image, the ecstatic expression on Modotti’s face provides some indication of the intensity of their new relationship.
Amy Conger locates only two prints of this image, both in institutional collections: a palladium print originally owned by Johan Hagemeyer and now at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson [view image below]; and a platinum print at the Baltimore Museum of Art. [quoted from source]
un regard oblique 