For nearly 50 years of my adult working life I have been in the Auto Collision repair business, specifically the refinishing end of the repair process.  During the majority of those years I was paid by the job, aka, Flat Rate.  In other words, you are paid for what you do day in day out, no work, no pay.   Worst yet, if you made a mistake and had to do something over a second time, no pay, you’re only paid once for the job.  This leads to becoming very efficient with time, SOPs, standard operating procedures were paramount to my livelihood.  

   Most know that I got my start in photography by joining the Connecticut Professional Photographers Association in 1981.  Met some great photographers, some are life long friends 40 years later.  In that sense I had an unfair advantage having so much talent around me.  Being the competitive guy that I am I aspired to gain their skills, particularly with those who practiced the Black and White genre of photography with large film cameras.  I applied the same mentality as I did in my day job.  I found a formula that worked and I stuck to it. I loved the B&W genre and soaked up all the knowledge I could, by 1985 my work was represented by the prestigious Robert Klein Gallery in Boston, MA.  In those early years I experimented a lot but never strayed too far from the SOPs that lead to early success.  SOPs are great for some things, not so great for creativity as I’ll share below. 

   In March of 1992,  myself and Glenn Curtis, immediate past president of the Connecticut Professional Photographers Association traveled out to the coast of California and Oregon for a 10 day photo trip.  Flying in and out of Southern CA we drove a lot and made some wonderfully diverse images as we traveled North.  Our northern most destination was the Oregon coast. The ever changing coast line is doted by sea stacks and tidal pools. One beach in particular was Bandon Beach where this month’s image was made.  I applied the same formula for shadows and highlights that I always had. I was rewarded with a negative with good detail in the dark values and detail in the higher values as seen above.  The featured image I made of a rock surrounded by sand with diagonal streaks of water has great spacial composition and a terrific sense of movement.  The detail within the specular highlights is almost silvery in the water receding back to the ocean, not an easy feat.  However, the image could have been even more if I were not bound to my tried and true SOPs !!   

   The Oregon beach images were some of the last negatives I made before our flight back to Connecticut. On the plane ride home was a magazine article about a photography exhibit, the Black and White imagery of Brett Weston. He was the 2nd son of famed photographer Edward Weston who I have written about in the past.  Van Deren Coke described Brett Weston as the “child genius of American photography.”  Weston mounted his first one-man museum retrospective at age 21 at the De Young Museum in San Francisco in January, 1932.  Brett Weston was ranked one of the top ten photographers collected by American museums during the 1990s.  In my own circle of passionate B&W film photographers, Brett is as revered as his father Edward !! 

  I checked in with my friend and owner of the Paul Paletti Gallery in Louisville, KY. Paul is an extremely knowledgable photography collector who told me he thought Brett’s work topped out at about $40 K on the auction market.  Whereas in April of 2008 a vintage 1925 nude by Edward Weston commanded $1.6 million @ Sotheby’s Auctions purchased by a NY city photography gallery owner.

   During the flight home I read the article and contemplated Brett’s unique style and graphic imagery. It didn’t take long to realize the manner in which I exposed the film a few days earlier on Bandon Beach could not produce an image in the style and vision of Brett Weston !!  My image is well executed in composition, exposure and printing…of a “rock on a beach surrounded by water”.  Back than the image was very satisfying and technically still is today, but with an underlying memory of a missed opportunity to grow and be more Creative !!

   Some of the accompanying images here illustrate Weston’s work as much more about spacial relationships than “what the image is”.  As I look at his images, my eye simply travels around these compositions similar to a Voyage of the Eye. I grabbed that phrase from one of Weston’s books by that title, nevertheless a perfect characterization of his imagery.  While I still align my own aesthetic with that of Brett’s father Edward, the accompanying images in my opinion are compositional master pieces in their use of light, shape and form.  There is a distinct sense of depth and dimension created light, shadows and careful attention for shapes not to converge with one another.  In a 1995 New York Times review, a critic wrote about Brett’s work as “for all their technical precision, Weston’s pictures seem cold and distanced, commanding admiration but little affection”.  While his father Edward’s work was seen as “a belief in the cleansing honesty of sharp-focus description and the expressive force of abstraction, both central premises of photographic Modernism.” 

   Brett believed strongly that only he could print his negatives with the integrity and conviction he originally envisioned for them.  On his 80th birthday and two years before his death in 1993, surrounded by friends and family, Brett tossed most all of his negatives into a brightly burning fireplace in his home in California. He had been promising to destroy all his film for more than two decades in a bid to pass on ultimate control over the editioning of his work to his estate. For me, this act seems all to self absorbed and clearly has denied generations of photographers from experiencing Brett’s visual genius and command of creative abstraction in a college darkroom learning environment.

“Nobody can print [my work] the way I do,” he told the Associated Press. “The prints are posterity, not the negatives. … I don’t want students and teachers to print my work.”   Here is a short one minute video on an exhibition titled Brett Weston, Out of the Shadows in Washington DC in 2008.

   For me, this act seems all to self absorbed and clearly has denied generations of photographers from experiencing Brett’s visual genius and command of creative abstraction in a college darkroom learning environment.

Stay Safe, and remain Healthy