Thinking about Edward Weston

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Edward Weston was one of the greats of American photography.  He was a friend of Ansel Adams, and had a tremendous impact on the photographic art world, at a time when photography was just being accepted as an art form that people could make a living at. 

Unlike Adams, Weston did very few landscapes, concentrating instead on pictures of people and objects.  Like Adams, Weston had a great sense of tonality (more on this later), and although he did only contact prints, he used dodging and burning to a great extent. 

I think Weston, who disliked darkroom work intensly, would have gravitated toward digital - however he was did not follow trends in technology, as Adams did, but was rather an independent individual who might well have continued to use his 8x10 view camera with film.  And, as with most people who are willing to go to that depth of technique today, the images would have been wonderful.

The Oakland Museum, located in Oakland, California has several rooms of Weston prints on display, as well as a fair number of Dorothea Lange, and a sprinking of photographs from other artists of the early 20th century.  If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, I recommend checking it out.  Those of you who do not make your way to the museum can see some of Weston's work at the Masters of Photography page.

I have a collection of photography books, mostly gleaned from used book stores, so I was already familiar with most of the images on display.  I was impressed by two things. 

First, the small size of the images.  They are all 8x10, or even 4x5 contact prints.  Someday, I predict, there will be an exhibit of enlarged Weston prints, and it will be a block buster. 

Second, the prints are really dark.  I'm not kidding, and this will be the focus of the rest of my discussion.

By dark, I mean all of Weston's prints had solid black areas, but the highlights were so gray that I would have tossed them in the trash in my darkroom days, and bumped to a higher contrast grade of paper.  Back then, I could not tolerate an image that did not have at least some pure white in it, and looking at my earlier prints, I would sometimes have whole swaths of near pure white in my images.

Nowadays, in the curvemeister class, I am constantly urging people to retain some amount of detail in highlight areas - blown out whites are the anathema of digital photography, more so than film.  Well, Weston takes this a step or two further.  Almost everything in the image has wonderful texture and contrast, but almost nothing, except an occational specular reflection, is actually pure white.

The reason seeing the actual prints is always such a surprise is that my photography books all compensate for this, and bump up the highlights to a more conventional level.  I had gotten used to this sort of bright look, and so it was a bit of a shock to see how dark the actual prints are.  Interestingly, the Masters of Photography images do not do this.  Most, not all, of the images have values that are similar to those of the actual prints.

So, for the next week or so, I'll be harranging students to make their images even darker.  I suspect, being of a sunny and optimistic disposition, I will "lighten up" a bit and return to keeping detail in the highlights, but without plunging the rest of the image into a Weston-like dark richness.

This is a no-flame zone.  Everyone is welcome to follow up with his or her own comments.

Mike

[mdavis]

Many of the great photos are dark.  Never thought of it before, Mike, but you're right.  Today, with the levels and curves of Photoshop, we are always shoving sliders around to pull the tonal ranges from bright white to dark black, like Ansel Adams Zone system tells us to do.

One trick is to set the high and low output levels in about 10 or so from 0 and 255.  This forces some shadow and highlight detail, depending on your printer.

When talking about b&w prints, I always have to remember that it isn't color.  In a color print, you often push for an extended tonal range and contrast for "bite".  In b&w, not every subject has a white point, in fact few do.  There are usually shadows, areas of minimal detail, and sometimes we push background darker to emphasize the subject as a matter of isolation of subject matter.

I'll go back and thumb through my wonderful set of Time-Life Photography books from the 1970s, but I'll bet many of the b&w images are darker than we are used to seeing in these days of Photoshop!

[mikemeister_admin]

Mike, in PSE4 I have set (and saved) the levels parameter black = 10 and Highlight = 240 based on Scott Kelbys books and articles in popular Photograpy. Does this have the same affect when using the Curvemeister filter? Is this the best approach to take?
Thanks Joe S