Weston obit

[cyrus]

Here's an interesting tidbit from the Weston obit in NY TImes of Jan 2 1958:

"He never used an enlarger nor artificial light. He did no retouching and rarely took a second shot of the same subject. His equipment was spare: an 8 x 10 Deardroff camera with two lenses: a 12-inch Cooke triple-convertible anatigmat (British-made) and a 14-inch Ektar lens; a tripod, filters and a meter."


I suppose the inevitable question is what tripod and head did he use?

[jshanesy]

I suppose the inevitable question is what tripod and head did he use?

Ries

[robc]

So that was his secret. A Ries tripod!

[davidb]

Actually, in his daybooks he mentions doing a lot of retouching and hating it. I believe there was a rather long rant about it too.

[Mark Sampson]

The retouching was for his commercial portraiture- and he eventually stopped it, taking a major commercial risk by advertising that he offered only "unretouched portraits" in the middle of the Depression.

[tim atherton]

a friend of mine believes he has weston's 12-inch Cooke triple-convertible

I keep trying to persuade him to leave it to me in his will... :-)

[Jerry Flynn]

The comment about not taking a second shot of the same subject is interesting. I've heard similar statements over the years.

However, a few years ago, I was at the Center for Creative Photrography in Tucson looking at a randomly selected box of Weston's images from the early 1940's from Point Lobos. There were perhaps a couple of dozen prints. After looking at them for a while, I realized that several of them were of the same subject but from different distances and angles. It was clear in this instance that Weston started with an area that might have been six by eight feet or something and continued to move in gradually until the final image was of perhaps and eight by ten inch detail. You might say that these different areas were diffrent subjects, I suppose, but to me it showed that at least on this occasion he made several exposures it an attempt to capture the ultimate image.

There have been some other myths, like he never dodged or burned, that are not accurate. Perhaps this is one as well.

[Mark Sampson]

Of course EW used a lot of different equipment over a long career. At the end of "California and the West" he actually complains about one of his lenses (it was a Turner-Reich). And the Daybooks are sprinkled with complaints about rickety, light-leaking 8x10s. A no-name Rapid Rectilinear lens of his, given as a gift to Brett and engraved as such, has often been on display at the George Eastman House. It's pretty wretched-looking and most of us multi-coated moderns wouldn't use it as a paperweight... yet many of his great images from Mexico were made with that lens.

[paulr]

I can think of a couple of cases where he mentioned taking more than one picture of the same subject.

The on that came to mind is the portrait of the dead guy in death valley. He said the neg that he was most excited about got damaged somehow (i forget the exact story).

Personally, there are a lot of things that as a matter of principle I've never done--but which in fact I've done quite a few times.

[Kevin Crisp]

I understand that the duplicate photo of the dead man in the desert was a full length shot, later ruined by double exposure.