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Lot Essay
So in photography, the first fresh emotion, feeling for the thing, is captured complete and for all time at the very moment it is seen and felt. Feeling and recording are simultaneous, hence the great vitality in pure photography and its loss in manipulated photography…Art is a way of seeing, not a matter of technique. Edward Weston, Daybooks
According to Amy Conger, all twenty-nine of the scenes of Oceano dunes taken by Weston in 1936 are horizontal compositions. His camera could be turned vertically, but his preference for the horizontal in his landscape work must be meaningful. This way of seeing shows that breadth was more important to him than depth, that the panoramic and expansive visual qualities he recorded were of very considerable beauty for him—that he might have been attracted to his roots, trying to relate to the earth itself.
This print shows Weston at the height of his creative powers. His tonal range extends from a deep black in a foreground dune to a bright white in the background sky. Space is almost unreadable. The sky offers no significant clues while the dunes form an intricate arrangement of gradations and textures. As ever, Weston used the whole frame; he includes not only a horizon line, but a sky with clouds that compliment and interact with the shadows and sand below.
According to Amy Conger, all twenty-nine of the scenes of Oceano dunes taken by Weston in 1936 are horizontal compositions. His camera could be turned vertically, but his preference for the horizontal in his landscape work must be meaningful. This way of seeing shows that breadth was more important to him than depth, that the panoramic and expansive visual qualities he recorded were of very considerable beauty for him—that he might have been attracted to his roots, trying to relate to the earth itself.
This print shows Weston at the height of his creative powers. His tonal range extends from a deep black in a foreground dune to a bright white in the background sky. Space is almost unreadable. The sky offers no significant clues while the dunes form an intricate arrangement of gradations and textures. As ever, Weston used the whole frame; he includes not only a horizon line, but a sky with clouds that compliment and interact with the shadows and sand below.