The George Eastman House in Rochester, New York is showing several large collections of Edward Weston's work this summer. It contains a pretty complete mix of his work, along with some personal effects and letters. I especially appreciated seeing more of his later work, which has more "man-altered landscapes" and social-environmental and artist's lifestyle images. This later work seems especially modern to me, and vastly better than all those MFA thesis attempts at approaching the same material.

My problem with the show the Eastman House's lighting. The images are lit so dim that they look like mud. I can get a better sense of his work from a book, and none of the images had the holding power or richness of the prints I've seen - in a bright gallery - in Carmel or elsewhere.

I understand the reasons for the dim lighting but geez, unless you knew what his prints looked like in a normal setting, you'd come away from the show saying, "So what?".

Has anyone else see it? Is it just the GEH that is paranoid about lighting, or are other major photo galleries turning down the watts?