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December 5, 2003
Norman Solomon
Dean
and the Corp Media Machine
Norman Madarasz
France
Starts Facing Up to Anti-Muslim Discrimination
Pablo Mukherjee
Afghanistan:
the Road Back
December 4, 2003
M. Junaid Alam
Image
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Adam Engel
Republican
Chris Floyd
Naked Gun: Sex, Blood and the FBI
Adam Federman
The US Footprint in Central Asia
Gary Leupp
The
Fall of Shevardnadze
Guthrie / Albert
RIP Clark Kerr
December 3, 2003
Stan Goff
Feeling
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Joanne Mariner
Profit Margins and Mortality Rates
George Bisharat
Who Caused the Palestinian Diaspora?
Mickey Z.
Tear Down That Wal-Mart
John Stanton
Bush Post-2004: a Nightmare Scenario
Harry Browne
Shannon
Warport: "No More Business as Usual"
December 2, 2003
Matt Vidal
Denial
and Deception: Before and Beyond Iraqi Freedom
Benjamin Dangl
An Interview with Evo Morales on the Colonization of the Americas
Sam Bahour
Can It Ever Really End?
Norman Solomon
That
Pew Poll on "Trade" Doesn't Pass the Sniff Test
Josh Frank
Trade
War Fears
Andrew Cockburn
Tired,
Terrified, Trigger-Happy
December 1, 2003
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Unholy
Alliances: Zionism, US Imperialism and Islamic Fundamentalism
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Baghdad Pitstop: Memories of LBJ in Vietnam
Harry Browne
Democracy Delayed in Northern Ireland
Wayne Madsen
Wagging the Media
Herman Benson
The New Unity Partnership for Labor: Bureaucratizing to Organize?
Gilad Atzmon
About
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Bill Christison
US
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November 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
On
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Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
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Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
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Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
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Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
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Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
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The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
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November 28, 2003
William S. Lind
Worse Than Crimes
David Vest
Turkey
Potemkin
Robert Jensen / Sam Husseini
New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks
Wayne Madsen
Wag
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Harold Gould
Suicide as WMD? Emile Durkheim Revisited
Gabriel Kolko
Vietnam
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South Asia Tribune
The Story
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Website of the Day
Bush Draft
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An
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In the Shadows of the School of the Americas
Al Krebs
Food as Corporate WMD
Jim Scharplaz
Going Up Against Big Food: Weeding Out the Small Farmer
Neve Gordon
Gays
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Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
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Bruce Jackson
Media
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Stew Albert
Perle's
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Alexander Cockburn
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David Orr
Miami Heat
Tom Crumpacker
Anarchists
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Mokhiber / Weissman
Militarization in Miami
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Kathy Kelly
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Iraq Procurement
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We,
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Diane Christian
Hocus
Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators
Mark Engler
Miami's
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David Lindorff
Ashcroft's
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Young McCarthyites of Texas
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Jeremy Scahill
The
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Elaine Cassel
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Iraq
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Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant
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Alexander Cockburn
Clintontime:
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Post-Machine Gun Tactics
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Imagine
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Impeach
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December
5, 2003
A Natural Eye
The
Photography of Brett Weston
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
On his 80th birthday, Brett Weston fed sixty years
worth of his negatives into the large fireplace in his home on
the Big Island of Hawai'i. Some of the negatives didn't burn
immediately. So Weston doused them with kerosene. Yes, he was
something of a pyro. Over the course of that evening in 1991,
flames consumed the raw material of one of the greatest photographic
legacies in the history of the medium.
Unlike Franz Kafka, who ordered his writings
destroyed, Weston hadn't been struck by a sudden insecurity about
the validity of his art. Quite the opposite. Weston simply didn't
trust anyone else to develop his prints.
"Printing is a very personal thing,"
Weston said. "My negatives are a bitch to produce. I wouldn't
want to develop anyone else's prints and wouldn't want anyone
else developing mine."
There was another, more personal reason
Weston burned his negatives. When his father Edward Weston died,
he left his prints to Brett and his negatives to Brett's younger
brother Cole, a landscape photographer with considerably less
talent than Brett. In the 1960s, Cole began rapidly pumping out
Edward Weston prints and selling them for thousands of dollars
apiece. He made a fortune, but Brett considered it an exploitation
of his father's work. He also griped that Cole's prints didn't
live up to his father's work.
In fact, Brett Weston did develop another
artist's prints: his father's. Stricken by Parkinson's disease
in the 1950s, Edward Weston, who along with Edward Steiglitz
had laid the theoretical foundations in the US for the acceptance
of photography as an art form, was too ill to develop his own
prints when an English patron offered to pay for a portfolio
of his body of work. Weston selected 800 images and Brett, by
then a seasoned and innovative photographer in his own right,
developed the prints. The result is widely viewed as one of the
century's master works.
* * *
Edward Weston is credited with fathering
the movement known as Western straight photography: no staging,
no contrived lighting, no cropping, no enlargement, no touch
ups. Weston began his career as a portrait photographer in Glendale,
California, taking photos of starlets, families and bankers.
His early creative work was in the lushly romantic "pictorialist"
style popular at the turn of the century: soft-focus, sentimental
settings, atmospheric lighting.
In 1923, Edward Weston left Glendale
and his studio, running off to Mexico with Tina Modotti, the
fiery Italian actress, who, under Weston's tutelage, would become
a photographer of the highest order. He abandoned Brett and his
mother, Flora Chandler, who would soon divorce Weston.
In Mexico City, Weston's art underwent
a dramatic transformation. His series of nude
photographs of Modotti, lounging on a rooftop or on a sand
dune, are images of stunning clarity, essays in lines and tones
of the human form: sensuous and realistic at the same time.
Meanwhile, back in LA Brett was acting
out. He was a rebellious youth and he didn't handle his father's
split from his mother very well. He became belligerent with his
mother, skipped school, and ran with a tough crowd. When Weston
returned from his first trip to Mexico in 1924, he said that
he found Brett on the verge of a life of delinquency.
This seems to have been something of
an exaggeration on Weston's part. Brett may have been ditching
algebra, but he was becoming an accomplished amateur naturalist.
He spent much of his time collecting butterflies and meticulously
preserving them and recording them by species and location, as
he would later catalog his vast collection of prints and negatives.
Not exactly Brando in the Wild Ones.
A few months later, Weston took Brett
back to Mexico City with him. He enrolled Brett in a sixth grade
class in an English language school. He lasted two weeks before
quitting. It was the end of Brett Weston's formal education.
The real learning took place in the Weston
house over the course of that year in Mexico City. At the center
of the household was Modotti, Weston's lover and apprentice,
his muse and political tutor. Then there was the trio of great
Mexican painters who were regular guests at the Weston house:
Diego
Rivera, Jose Orozco and David Alfero Siquieros. D.H.
Lawrence also came and went working on his great novel on
life in Mexico, The Plumed Serpent. Over dinner and on outings
to the coast and the mountains, intense debates erupted over
politics and art, arguments fueled by the prodigious consumption
of tequila.
Soon after Brett arrived in Mexico Edward
Weston gave his son a Graflex camera, launching his life as a
photographer. His first shots were of stems
of lilies and an image of the tin roofs of houses that has
the disjointed composition of a Cezanne painting. Brett's first
photos were unmistakably modern: crisp, unadorned, devoid of
sentimentality. They show the influence of Rivera and Orozco
as much as any other photographer.
Later, Weston confessed that painters,
especially the Mexican muralists, exerted more of an influence
on his work than did other photographers. He expressed little
admiration for the photographs of Edward Steichen, Paul Strand
and Steiglitz.
Soon the teenager was schooling his father.
Brett's most important early contribution to the advancement
of Edward Weston's work was to convince him to shift from platinum/palladium
prints to the silver gelatin prints that marked the best work
of both Westons. Brett also introduced his father on the erotic
possibilities of vegetables, as seen in the remarkable 1930 photograph
by Edward Weston titled "Pepper
No. 30." Brett later boasted of having devoured the
subject.
By 1926 the Weston's were back in Glendale
and Brett began working in his father's studio, learning the
rudiments of photography by developing negatives and doing enlargements
for Weston's commercial and portrait work. He also pursued his
own photography with an intensity that would never dissipate.
He took dozens of photos every week of flowers, shells, cars,
buildings, hands and feet, broken windows, the San Bernadino
Mountains. His photos received their first public showing at
an exhibition at UCLA in 1927, along with a series taken by his
father. He was sixteen. Two years later, Brett's photos were
shown at the Film und Foto exhibition, sponsored by the
Bauhaus group, in Stuttgart, Germany.
By 1930, the Westons had moved from Glendale
to Carmel, where they would be at the center of a community of
artists for the remainder of their lives. Edward Weston's small
studio attracted other photographers, such as Imogen Cunningham
and Ansel Adams, as well as writers and musicians seeking to
have Weston take their portrait: Robinson
Jeffers, ee cummings and Stravinsky.
Brett lived frugally for most of his
life, eking out a living as a photographer without resorting
to portraits, commercial work or magazine commissions. "I
didn't mind whoring," Weston said. "I just wasn't very
good at it."
But he still found himself at the center
of things. Broke in LA in the 1930s, he ended up house-sitting
in a new Hollywood home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright ("stunning
structure, but it leaked"). He tried his hand at working
as a cinematographer on a movie set. The results weren't satisfying
for either the studio or Brett.
A few years later, Jose
Clemente Orozco, who Brett had idolized from his days in
Mexico City, showed up in southern California and hired Brett
to assist the painter in his great Prometheus
mural at Pomona College in Claremont.
Weston's work from this time represents
a robust Western expressionism, livelier than Ansel Adams's austere
work and more attuned to the parallel movements modernist movements
in painting and sculpture. He photographed a delicate series
of faceless nudes dominated by twisting legs and hands, close-ups
of tide pools and shells, and an
erotic barrel cactus that looks like it is sprouting dozens
of spiky breasts.
He received his first solo exhibition
in 1932 at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, which was soon
followed by a joint showing with the members of the f/64 Group,
including Adams, Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke and Sonia Noskowiak.
Brett's close-up a hand and ear was so admired by Russian director
Sergei Eisenstein that he swiped it off the gallery wall.
But Weston didn't consider himself part
of this collective or a photographic movement per se. Indeed,
he maintained a lifelong rivalry with Adams, who was one of the
first West Coast photographers to make a fortune. Adams poured
much of his money into building a palatial house and large darkroom
made of redwood in Carmel near Weston's small, self-made adobe.
"You spent more on your darkroom than my father did on his
entire house, Ansel, but you're pictures aren't nearly as good,"
Brett told Adams. "You cut down an entire redwood forest
to build your house and they still let you stay on the board
of the Sierra Club?"
Unlike his father who wrote compulsively,
Brett was not a theoretician and perhaps that explains the reason
he is less known despite being in many ways the superior artist.
Edward was loquacious, a gifted self-promoter. Brett was a loner,
reticent and uncomfortable speaking about his art.
"My father was driven and so am,"
Weston said. "You're ruthless. You brush off your friends
and women. He was much kinder than me. I don't verbalize well
and I don't socialize much. Too time consuming. And I'm not a
good salesman of my work. I love people, but they can be a drain.
Some are stimulating; some are leeches. So I seek people on my
own terms. Most artists are loners. I guess they have to be."
In 1935, Brett caught a break. He was
hired as the supervisor of the photographic section of the Federal
Arts Project. He trained and managed more than 20 photographers.
This position, and a short-lived job as a sculptor for the Public
Works Art Project, eased him through the depression.
He was drafted into the Army in 1942
and made to endure basic training twice. Later he was sent to
the Signal Corps before finally being assigned to a position
as an Army photographer, where he had to be retrained. For two
years, he was stationed in Long Island under Lt. Arthur Rothstein,
formerly the head of the photographic project for the Farm Security
Administration, where he supervised the work of Walker Evans
and Dorthea Lange. Rothstein assigned Weston to photograph New
York City. The images Weston came back with, taken with an 11
x 14 camera loaned to him by the Frick Museum, are original
and startling explorations of a cityscape, which seem closer
to the paintings of the city by John Marin than the photos of
Steichen or Margaret Burke-White.
In "Manhattan Courtyard", a
frail, leafless tree with a knot of thin branches stretches upward
toward an unseen light in a canyon of buildings. The image is
strikingly similar to a photo he would take 25 years later in
the heart of Glen Canyon, where a cottonwood tree stands alone
before the sheer wall of the canyon. In "Sutton Place",
Weston captures a dark, winter afternoon at an brick apartment
complex encased in vines of ivy. His photo "47th Street"
is a study of rooflines and staircases that is as disorienting
as any work by M.C. Escher.
But Weston was primarily a photographer
of the West and he relished his transfer from New York to El
Paso in 1945. On his way down to El Paso from Albuquerque, Brett
passed for the first time through Tularosa Basin and the great
dunes of White Sands National Monument (and the missile testing
range that engulfs it) and promptly went AWOL. He stopped his
truck, got a room at local hotel, phoned the Army base to say
that he had been felled by the flu and spent the next few days
photographing the wind-sculpted dunes, cactus, yucca and the
serrated peaks of the nearby Sierra Blanca mountains.
He would return
to White Sands many times over the coming decades. Indeed,
Weston tended to migrate in his Chevy truck with camper to the
same landscapes year after year: Death Valley, White Sands, Oceano
Dunes, Baja, southeast Alaska, coastal Oregon, the Owens Valley,
the Big Island of Hawai'i and, of course, the tide pools, headlands
and beaches of Pt. Lobos and Big Sur just down Highway 1 from
his home in Carmel Highlands.
Weston's photos from the 1950s and 60s,
whether of shiny black strands of kelp or a close-up of the cracked
ice of the Mendenhall Glacier, had a luminescent quality to them,
which he later described as "glowacious."
* * *
In 1969, Weston traveled to Eugene, Oregon
to give a talk at photographic workshop at the university. There
he met Art Wright, a grad student in photojournalism, who had
long been an admirer of Weston's art. At the time, Wright was
kicking around ideas for his thesis project. On a whim, he asked
Weston at a party if he would allow Wright to make a film documenting
the photographer at work. Weston, an intensely private man, surprised
Wright by enthusiastically agreeing to the project.
"I liked the pure simplicity of
Brett's vision," says Wright. "There was nothing ostentatious
about his life or his work. I was in awe of his photographs."
At the time, Wright was living on a commune
outside of Eugene, paying $30 a month rent and looking for a
way to live outside the system, as Weston had done. "One
of the things on my mind at the time was how to lead a creative
and exciting life and not work for the Man," says Wright.
"Brett Weston lived a frugal life, but without compromise."
A few days later Wright accompanied Weston
to the Oregon Dunes National Seashore near Reedsport. It was
a trial run to see if Brett could tolerate working while Wright
filmed him with his buzzing 16-mm camera. The two men hit it
off and remained friends for the next 20 years.
The sharp black-and-white footage Wright
filmed of Weston setting up a shot inside the ruins of an old
wigwam burner at an abandoned timber mill site and trudging across
the dunes with his Rolloflex became the opening sequence of his
extraordinary film, Brett Weston: Photographer.
Wright's wife, Janet, a librarian and
artist, located a grant program run by the National Endowment
for the Humanities that was offering $1,500 for projects dealing
with "the land." Wright titled his film project "Brett
Weston: Man of the Land" and got the grant. Of course, that
paltry sum wasn't nearly enough to finance the film. Wright had
to max out his and Janet's credit cards to purchase film stock
and gas.
A few weeks after the Oregon outing,
Wright joined Weston and two of his friends for a trip across
California and Nevada. The film follows Weston as he explores
some of his favorite photographic haunts: the Alabama Hills,
Death Valley, Lake Isabella, a truck graveyard in Goldfield,
Nevada, and the Owens Valley under the shadow of the Sierras.
Although this is all familiar terrain,
the film captures several serendipitous moments, such as when
Weston stops at a road cut and becomes entranced by the shapes
and shadows of columnar basalt. "It's an explosion of geometry,"
exudes Weston.
Weston isn't really a nature photographer.
He isn't interested in Ansel Adams-esque landscapes or in documenting
threatened wild places like Eliot Porter. He was obsessed with
capturing the intricacies and rhythms of form, light and shadow.
Weston is as fascinated by close-ups of the exfoliating bark
of a bristlecone pine or the spikes of a Joshua Tree as he is
with the visual poetry of peeling paint on the side-panel of
a rusted out truck.
"There are a million choices for
shot," Weston tells Wright. "At its simplest, photography
is very complex. So I try to keep it simple and focus on things
I can master."
How do you know when you have something,
Wright asks.
"I have an orgasm, Art," Weston
chuckles. "You just know it. There's a flash of inspiration.
Like with certain women. You feel marvelous and just take off."
There were many women in Weston's life
and four wives. Even so, except for the stunning series of underwater
nudes, shot in the black tile pool at his home in the Carmel
Highlands, his body of work does not offer many images of women.
But there many of his images are highly erotic, especially the
sinuous lines of the dunes at Oceano or on the Oregon coast,
the wet tangles of kelp in tide pool, the flesh of a barrel cactus,
the thigh-like humps of sandstone in the Alabama Hills in the
California desert.
He tells Wright that he has been photographing
Point Lobos for going on forty years but still finds it fresh.
"Point Lobos is always changing," Weston says. "I've
lived and photographed there nearly all my life, but even in
the last few years I've done some of my best work there."
Wright's film is one of the most detailed
and intimate document of a working photographer ever made. He
follows Weston from scouting locations, to setting up shots and
to the tedious work in his small darkroom in Carmel.
"The dark room was very small,"
recalls Wright. "I had my back against the wall as I shot
him developing his prints."
Brett Weston got up each morning before
dawn, whether he was in the field or working at home in the dark
room. In his last decades he would awaken even earlier. It wasn't
unusual for him to be working in the darkroom by 2am. He would
work for four or five hours straight, dipping the print paper
into the toxic amidol developing chemical that turned the fingernails
on his left hand black.
In Wright's film, a weary Weston emerges
from the dark room after five hours of developing prints. "I
come up for air at 9 or 10 in the morning," he tells Wright.
"It's a great drain on one's vitality. You have to be disciplined.
Without discipline there's very little art. It's hard work and
sheer brutal, drudgery, like writing literature."
According to Wright, Weston's small,
spartan house had a lot of bookshelves, but they weren't stocked
with volumes of Proust or Joyce. "He loved Louis Lamour,"
Wright joked.
For Weston, the photographic process
continued through the developing of the negatives to the trimming,
matting and framing of the prints. Wright films the photographer
preparing dozens of prints in preparation for the first comprehensive
exhibition of his work at the Friends of Photography gallery
in Carmel. Here the short film reaches its conclusion with dozens
of people, hippies, working stiffs and art snobs, mulling through
the exhibition of photos, many of which were taken during the
trip with Wright.
"I enjoy the reaction of ordinary
people who are not art patrons," says Weston. "I like
some guy or gal with an honest admiration for a photo, a carpenter
or bricklayer, instead of some pseudosophisticated museum director
from the art world who thinks he knows it all."
Wright's film on Weston came out in 1972
under the title, "Brett Weston: Man of the Land." "It
was a silly title, but we had to call it that to fulfill the
grant," Wright says.
But he kept editing the footage for the
next year and a half and later released a tighter version called
simply "Brett Weston: Photographer." At the time, photography
was just beginning to be viewed as a fine art in the university
system. Weston was known and highly regarded inside photography
world, but was still largely unknown to the general public. Wright
rented out his film to schools and universities for the next
15 years, introducing Weston to a new generation of photographers
and artists. Weston and Wright remained close for the next 20
years, until Brett's death in Kona, Hawaii in 1993.
* * *
Wright wanted to make more documentaries
on photographers. His next subject was meant to be W. Eugene
Smith, who had just unveiled his remarkable and disturbing photographic
study of the mercury poisoning of the fishing village of Minamata,
Japan. "Smith was going blind at the time," Wright
recalls. "He struck me as the Beethoven of photography."
In the end, though, Smith didn't want
to be filmed at the end of his career, when he needed his wife
and his assistants to help him compose his shots and develop
his prints.
Wright went on to teach photography at
Idaho State University in Pocatello and moved back to Oregon
in the mid-1980s when his wife Janet got a job as a librarian
at Portland State University. Wright went to work as a cameraman
at a local TV station. He retired a couple of years ago put himself
to work transferring
his film on Weston to DVD.
"I'd resisted transferring the film
to VHS," says Wright. "Video is a poor quality format.
It would demean the work of a photographer for whom visual clarity
was paramount. But the opportunity to digitalize the film seemed
worthwhile. It also allowed me to fix the sound quality and add
some extra features, including audio interviews with Weston's
friends and colleagues."
Wright also got permission from the Weston
archive to include 800 of Brett's photos on the DVD. In its current
format, Wright's film is as close as we get to a biographical
and critical study of Brett Weston's career. He is perhaps the
most important American artist who is yet to be the subject of
a full-length biography. Shot in stark black-and-white, Wright's
film is, in its way, as beautiful to look at as a Weston print.
And then there is Weston's voice, gruff and serious as a rattlesnake
on moment and impish and jesting the next.
Weston isn't a nature photographer, but
he is, perhaps, our best photographer of nature. His photographs,
with the notable exception of the series on the doomed Glen Canyon,
can't be considered in any way overtly political.
But it's clear where Weston's allegiances
are. As he drives across the Sierras and up the Owens Valley,
he lashed out to Wright about the about the new interstate highways
and rash of housing developments in Tahoe and Sacramento. He
reveals himself to be a kind of western anarchist, not all that
different than Edward Abbey.
"There's no tremendous change in
people," laments Weston. "But the machines have changed.
And that's the monkeywrench for the whole goddamn mess."
* * *
After Wright's film came out, Weston's
career began to take off. In the mid-1970s, art photography became
a chic form of investment. The prices for Weston's prints soared
from a couple hundred dollars to over a thousand. He came into
money for the first time in his life.
In the 1970s, Art Wright bought one of
Weston's prints of his famous "Ear and Hand" photo
for $75. The photo hangs in Wright's house and on the canceled
check to Weston is taped to the back of the frame. Today that
same print sells for $30,000.
For a short time, Weston, who had always
been a kind of one man band framing his prints and selling them
himself, even hired a manager to sell his prints to rich patrons
and corporations.
He built a house in on the big island
of Hawaii, where he made some of his most astonishing photographs.
Much of the money went into cars. His obsession with cars began
early on, when he manned the wheel on his father's expeditions.
Edward never learned to drive. But by the 1980s, the old Chevy
trucks had been replaced by new Corvettes. Two of them. According
to Wilson, Weston's first Corvette was a stick shift, which he
had a hard time handling after a bite by a poisonous spider impaired
his right arm. So he bought an identical Corvette with an automatic
transmission. He refused to let anyone else drive him around
or drive his cars.
In his last years, Brett was slowed by
a bad heart. It was hard for him to lug around his camera up
the slopes of Manna Keg. So increasingly he devoted himself to
printing, churning out thousands of prints from his negatives.
In a final editing of his oeuvre, Weston destroyed many of his
prints. "An artist must eliminate, I've destroyed prints
by the thousands," Weston said.
Then there was the final inferno, a year
before he died, when he pitched all of his negatives into the
huge fireplace, one of the few on the big island.
When he died, he left 10,000 prints to
the Brett Weston Trust. Brett believed that the prints would
be sold off gradually for the financial benefit of his sole daughter,
Erica.
Instead, an investment banker snatched
up the entire lot for a few million dollars. The Weston photographic
legacy, which he had fought so hard to preserve on his own terms,
is now locked in a vault in the basement of a bank in Oklahoma
City.
By incinerating his negatives, Brett
Weston assured that the value of each remaining print would skyrocket
to the lofty levels that they could only be owned by the rich
elites and art snobs that he had despised all his life. Even
Weston might have seen the irony in that final development.
The DVD of Brett Weston: Photographer
may be purchased from Art
Wright's website.
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
On
the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone
Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math
Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
with John Pilger
Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
Bridge
Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
Adam Engel
The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith
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