An Edward Weston you never knew

Edward Weston is often considered a dark figure in photography, a man ultimately estranged from his family and obsessed by images of death. Alex Nyerges would like to fix all that. "A lot of what gets written is reinterpretation of misinterpretation," he says. "Edward Weston as a dark, morose, brooding loner." Nyerges, director of the Dayton Institute of Art in Ohio, is in a unique position to straighten out the historical record on Weston, a key player in the history of photography. By a happy accident of history, his museum has managed to borrow and acquire an astounding collection of Weston's work - original prints Weston made and gave, over the years, as gifts to his older sister, Mary, who raised him as a child.

The collection of photographs, as well as hundreds of letters and postcards in the photographer's own hand, languished, covered by dust, in the closet of Mary's daughter in California, who knew only that they were family heirlooms. In the mid-1970s her nephew, Jack Longstreth, discovered them. Recognizing their importance, he packaged them up and shipped them to his home in Ohio and got in touch with the Dayton museum. Nyerges, a huge fan of Weston's work, curated this show himself, titling it "A Photographer's Love of Life" to help counter the loveless image Weston has left. The exhibit, which includes more than 80 vintage prints, showed earlier this year at the Dayton Art Institute. It opened this weekend at the Portland Art Museum.

Weston is one of those artists whose work is difficult to see with fresh eyes. Reproductions of his shells and peppers and nudes are everywhere. One of the great virtues of Nyerges' show is that it brings out some lesser known work, challenging us to see Weston's mature photography as though for the first time: crisp and modern, yes, but hardly dark and morose.

A 1937 photo of haystacks at a ranch near San Luis Obispo, for example, shows the photographer's keen eye for abstract form and design in everyday life. Also interesting are some of Weston's earlier photographs, taken in the youthful period before modernism overtook his dedication to soft-focus pictorialism. His 1914 photograph of a young archer, silhouetted between two trees, would be recognized by very few as a Weston. But a 1919 portrait of set designer George Hopkins, though also done in a soft, romantic style, begins to show a more modern look, with its clean lines, interest in shadow and stark composition.

The biggest surprise in the show may be Weston's color photography. Still shooting with his trademark 8-by-10-inch view camera, he made a series of Kodachrome transparencies of some of his favorite subjects in the late 1940s: shells, the California Coast, the desert and weathered trees. They show that Weston was still trying new artistic forms at the end of his career.

Sept. 12, 2004