Across The Margin / ATM Publishing presents Chapter Two of Arthur Hoyle’s The Jealous Muse — Edward Weston : The Camera as Muse…
Chapter Two — Edward Weston : The Camera as Muse
In the career of photographer Edward Weston we can trace a connection between an artist’s creative fecundity and his sexual freedom. We can also witness the personal drama of Weston’s conflict between his commitment to his medium—his muse—and his sense of responsibility to others, especially members of his own family. The journals and letters Weston wrote reveal that his periods of highest creative output often coincided with periods of unrestrained promiscuity. They also reveal that he suffered torments of guilt over his neglect of his children and his infidelity to their mother. While living in Mexico with his lover Tina Modotti and his oldest son Chandler during the early nineteen twenties, he tried to justify in a journal entry the choices he had made.
One does not necessarily act for the best, nor even nobly, in destroying personal aspirations for the sake of others. The greatest if less apparent gain, even for those others, must come from the fulfilling of one’s predilection rather than in sentimental sacrifice. Yet I do realize that I face sacrifice, no matter what the decision . . . My eternal question is between my emotional, personal love for them [his children], my selfish love! —and the impersonal consideration, realization, that to do the best for them—unselfishly—I must think of Edward Weston first. (Daybook v.1, Feb 25, 1925 p. 117)
Weston wrestled with this issue throughout his working life and never satisfactorily resolved it. But his first love remained his camera.
The first camera came into Weston’s hands when he was sixteen, living in Chicago. The camera, a Kodak Bullseye that held a roll of twelve 31/3 x 31/3 negatives, was a gift from his father, Edward, a medical doctor. The invention and marketing of the Kodak box camera was the first step in making photography the mass medium that it became in the twentieth century. It made photography available to everyone. It took photography out of the hands of professional portraitists working in studios with bulky equipment and slow glass negatives and brought it into the street, where images of the everyday world could be captured. It enabled consumers to build their own personal photo albums instead of having to rely on store bought stereoscopes and stereo cards that provided standardized images of the world.
Around the time that Weston received his first camera, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz was initiating the movement to establish photography as a medium of fine art. In March 1902 he curated an exhibition of photographs at the National Arts Club in New York that was judged by photographers. Several months later, Stieglitz published the first issue of Camera Work, a journal devoted exclusively to the aesthetics of photography. Three years later, he opened his own gallery, the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, at 291 Fifth Avenue, where his own work and the work of Edward Steichen, among others, were hung. Edward Weston began taking pictures at the birth of the modern era in photography.
The gift of the camera was a transforming event in Weston’s life. He was a frail and shy boy, short of stature at 5’4” and slight. His mother Alice died when he was five, and four years later his father remarried, to a widow with four sons older than Weston. He did not bond with the new family, but became very close to his sister May, nine years older, who had taken on the role of mothering him.
Weston disliked school. He once wrote to his son Brett, “School is a good place to train and mold the minds of those who are to be the slaves of the world.” He often played hooky with his camera as companion, roaming the streets of Chicago looking for subject matter. Many years later, living in Carmel, California, Weston described in his journal his first excitement at being alone in the world with his camera.
Can I ever forget certain days, periods, places? One of the earliest, —the scene in a Chicago apartment, printing from my first negative made with a stand camera purchased with money saved penny by penny, walking ten miles to save ten cents, denying sweets, selling rags and bottles: a second hand camera I had seen in a downtown window, with tripod and filter it cost $11. I can even recall my ecstatic cry as the print developed out—“It’s a peach!” —and how I ran, trembling with excitement, to my father’s library to show this snow-scene made in Washington Park, —a tree, a winding stream, snow-covered banks. I slipped into the stream and rode home on the Cottage Grove cable car with my trouser legs frozen stiff as a board. (Daybook v. 2, p. 122 May 14, 1929)
The camera for young Weston was more than a machine that could magically create imagery, and photography for him was more than a teenager’s hobby. It consumed him, and brought him into a new relationship with reality. “I needed no friends now—I was always alone with my love . . . My whole life changed—because I became interested in something concrete.” (Maddow, p. 58)
In 1903, when Weston was seventeen, May married John Hancock Seaman and the couple moved to Tropico, California, a suburb of Los Angeles that eventually was absorbed by Glendale. Weston dropped out of high school and moved in with his Uncle Theodore and his Aunt Emma. Theodore arranged an entry-level job for Weston at Marshall Field, where he also worked. Weston ran errands for the shipping department, then was promoted to salesman. May had been inviting Weston to visit her in California. In May 1906 he had enough money saved to make the trip. A summer visit was planned, but at the end of the summer Weston decided to stay.
Initially he lived with his sister and her husband in Tropico. John found employment for him as a surveyor for the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad. May introduced him to her best friend Flora Chandler, a relative of the wealthy Los Angeles Chandler family that published the Los Angeles Times, among other ventures. Flora was a schoolteacher seven years older than Weston, an age gap that nearly mirrored the distance between Weston and his sister. They began a courtship that featured chaperoned outings to Camp Rincon, where they slept in tents, cooked outdoors on open fires, picnicked by rushing streams, and rode horseback.
A letter Weston wrote to Flora in October 1907 on railroad stationery exhibits Weston’s sharp visual eye and flair for poetic natural description as he records sense impressions from one of his surveying forays.
Meadow Valley Creek—what a picture this may conjure up of verdant meadows & rolling hills and dancing waters, flecked by sunshine which filters through cool archways of spreading shade trees . . . It is a misnomer. The meadow is a barren, scorching desert naked of all vegetation except stunted growths of sage brush and cacti struggling for existence, and only here and there a cotton-wood with its clean cut limbs and fresh green leaves to rest the eye: the valley is only a narrow cañon with grim forbidding walls and the water swirls against its sides in vain endeavor to find escape. But to those who come to know its value, the creek is like a vein of pure silver running thru the lowest grade muck. (Edward Weston Collection, Getty Center, Album A)
One senses in Weston’s words the allure that spontaneous observations of the natural world held for him. As it had in high school, the camera again pulled Weston away from the dependability and restrictions of a predictable, conventional routine. He quit his job with the railroad to become an itinerant photographer, roving the countryside on horseback and taking photographs of ordinary subjects that he offered for sale in the emerging photo postcard market.
In 1908 Weston returned to Chicago and enrolled in the Illinois College of Photography, where he learned darkroom technique. He completed the nine-month course in six months, but was denied a diploma when he refused to pay the full nine-month tuition. He returned to Tropico and married Flora on January 30, 1909. They built a simple home on land owned by Flora’s parents, and Weston went to work as an assistant in a series of portrait photography studios in Los Angeles.
Flora and Weston started a family. Their first child, named Edward Chandler Weston and called Chandler, was born April 26, 1910. On December 16, 1911 a second son, Theodore Brett Weston, was born. He was called Brett, the maiden name of Weston’s deceased mother. Over the course of his career Weston took many photographs of his children, recording the evolution of their growth. Flora collected the childhood photos in albums that reveal the depth of Weston’s feelings for his family: a tender photo of Flora holding the naked infant Chandler; Chandler, age one, holding a chocolate rabbit; two year old Chandler reading comics; Chandler at two holding baby brother Brett; Brett seated on Flora’s lap as she looks at him lovingly; the infant Brett holding a teddy bear; Brett, age two, holding a ball. These photos give us images of a conventional, middle class family life that Weston, before long, would chafe against.
In 1911 Weston quit his job at the studio of A. Louis Mojonier, a prominent Los Angeles portrait photographer, and established his own studio in a shack he built on land owned by Flora near their home in Tropico. Using an 11×14 view camera Weston opened his photographic business making formal portraits of men, women, couples, and children. His subjects were conventionally posed against neutral, monotone backgrounds, their faces and character revealed through the skillful use of natural light. Their expressions are open and genuine, suggesting that they felt comfortable revealing themselves to Weston’s penetrating gaze. Their individuality is apparent in their frank, unaffected expressions. They look themselves. Though his studio was off the beaten track in Tropico, Weston quickly built a successful portrait business and began to acquire a national reputation through publication of his photographs in photography periodicals.
In 1913 Weston was introduced to the photographer Margrethe Mather, a woman with whom he became both romantically and aesthetically involved. The intermediary who brought them together was Elmer Ellsworth, a Los Angeles bohemian with connections to both the city’s fledgling movie industry and its radical political element. Ellsworth was an entrepreneur who had operated vaudeville theaters where the anarchist Emma Goldman sometimes spoke. He became a gag writer for silent film comedians, including Charlie Chaplin, and socialized with Chaplin’s friends. Ellsworth and Mather were both members of the Los Angeles Camera Club, and on a club outing to Griffith Park Ellsworth brought Mather to Weston’s studio. A few days later Mather returned to the studio to pose for Weston, and he subsequently asked her to join his studio as his assistant. They soon became lovers, though it is unclear whether their romantic relationship became fully sexual at this time. In 1925 Weston destroyed the Daybook covering this period in his life and in which he would have recorded intimate details of his personal life.
Mather was an unconventional woman with a mysterious past and openness to experimentation in both her life and work. She was born March 4, 1886—the month and year of Weston’s birth—in Salt Lake City. In a version of her early life history that she fabricated, she was orphaned at an early age and adopted by a mathematics professor and his common-law wife Minnie. As a teenager, she worked as a prostitute, servicing local businessmen in Salt Lake. She moved to California when her vocation was about to be exposed, and settled in Los Angeles.
In truth her real name was Emma Caroline Youngren. Her parents were Mormons who had emigrated from Denmark. Emma’s father Gabriel remarried after the death of his wife and fathered six more children. Emma was raised by her maternal aunt, Rasmine Laurentzen, who worked as a live-in housekeeper for Joseph Cole Mather, a widower employed in the mining industry as a metallurgist. Emma attended high school in Salt Lake but did not graduate. She took Mather’s name when she was eighteen, and two years later, in the same year that Weston came to live with his sister, she left Salt Lake for California. She lived for a time in San Francisco, calling herself Margrethe, the name of her deceased maternal grandmother. By 1912 she was living in Los Angeles, in a rooming house on Bunker Hill, and supporting herself with prostitution.
As Mather and Weston became acquainted in his studio, they must have remarked the similarities in their life journeys: born three weeks apart; deprived at an early age of their mothers; raised in alien households; failed to complete high school; drawn to California as a means of reinventing themselves. Mather, like Weston, had publicly exhibited her photographs. Her photograph titled “Maid of Arcady,’’ depicting a nude woman (possibly Mather herself) standing in a wood with her back to the camera, was shown at the American Salon and reproduced in American Photography. It was considered daring for its time.
Mather proposed to Weston that they establish a camera club devoted to aesthetic photography, to be called the Camera Pictorialists of Los Angeles. This represented a west coast version of Stieglitz’s efforts in New York to promote photography as a fine art form commensurate with other fine arts, such as painting, sculpture, and music. Photography at the time was considered by critics to be a craft, not an art, because it relied on a machine rather than the human hand. But as Weston would later point out in a talk that he gave at a college in California, musicians also relied on machines to create works of art. Just as it was the pianist, not the piano, who performed a beautiful sonata, so it was the photographer, not the camera, who created an aesthetically pleasing image.
Pictorialism was the prevailing style for “art” photography. It derived from the visual aesthetic of contemporary painting, especially the work of James Whistler. Pictorial photography was romantic and decorative. It featured idyllic subject matter, rendered in soft focus with muddy tones. As the title “Maid of Arcady” suggests, pictorial photography was allusive, aiming to evoke a mood rather than to give a strict representation. By the outbreak of World War I, the aesthetics of pictorial photography were being challenged by the modernist aesthetic of clear, sharp, formal photography as practiced by east coast artists such as Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler. This modernist aesthetic had reached New York with the exhibition of work by Picasso, Kandinsky, Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, and many other European artists at the famous Armory Show of 1913. But modernism did not arrive in Los Angeles until the end of the war, and it came through the architecture of Rudolf Schindler and Frank Lloyd Wright. Mather and Weston continued to work in the pictorial mode until the nineteen twenties, although the formal elements of modernism (clean lines, abstractions, geometric shapes) began to appear in their photographs even while the treatment remained “pictorial.”
During the war years, the collaboration between Mather and Weston continued. They exhibited at the same salons, and photographed each other, with Mather sometimes posing nude. Mather’s connection to the movie world through Ellsworth and Chaplin gave her opportunities to photograph celebrities such as Nijinsky and Rudolf Valentino, as well as the writer Max Eastman and his lover Florence Deshon, who became Chaplin’s mistress as well. When Carl Sandburg came to Los Angeles in 1921 on a lecture tour, Mather and Weston photographed him standing on a bridge. Weston by then considered Mather his full partner and they began co-signing their studio work. They had become cultural celebrities in their own right, often mentioned in the entertainment section of the Los Angeles Times.
Mather also brought Weston into the orbit of political radicals such as Emma Goldman, Bill Haywood of the Industrial Workers of the World, and the photographer Johan Hagemeyer, a pacifist who lived in San Francisco and worked for a short while as Weston’s studio assistant in exchange for room and board. Though Weston’s sympathies lay with these leftists, he was not and never would be politically active. He kept his focus on photography as an art form and had no interest in using it as a tool of social protest and reform, even during the Depression, when documentary photography became ascendant through the work of Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans. The Espionage Act of 1917 put many of Mather’s and Weston’s friends in jeopardy. Emma Goldman and her lover Alexander Berkman were deported to Russia in December 1919, and in 1920 Weston’s friend Hagemeyer left the country to escape harassment by the government.
The personal relationship between Weston and Mather seems to have been fraught with uncertainty and instability, a reflection of Mather’s character. Mather sometimes disappeared mysteriously, offering Weston no explanation. She took other lovers, and may have been in a lesbian relationship with Florence Reynolds, a wealthy woman who became her benefactress, giving her a lifetime lease on Mather’s studio on Bunker Hill. Her friend Florence Deshon said of her, “She never accomplishes anything and has excuse after excuse . . . She is very stubborn.” (Warren, p. 75)
In April 1921, two months after forming his studio partnership with Mather, Weston began an affair with Tina Modotti, an actress working in Hollywood and passing herself as the wife of Roubaix de l’Abrie Richey (Robo), a writer and painter who was making plans to move to Mexico City to open a studio. Weston’s marriage to Flora was broken, but they now had four sons to care for. Lawrence Neil Weston had been born on December 6, 1916, and Cole Weston followed on January 30, 1919. Weston’s studio business was supporting them, but he was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with his work as a portrait photographer and wanted the freedom to pursue his fine art photography. He felt both confined by and obligated to his family.
Robo had been invited by Ricardo Robelo, a Mexican official recently appointed Director of the Department of Fine Arts at the Ministry of Education in Mexico City, to take up a teaching position there. Modotti was to join him as soon as she completed work on two films. Robo suggested to Weston that he join them in Mexico City, and set about arranging an exhibition at the Academia de Bellas Artes that would include work by Weston and Mather. Robo died from smallpox two months after arriving in Mexico City. Modotti had rushed to Mexico to be with him, but was forbidden entry to his hospital room. She completed arrangements for the exhibition that Robo had planned, then went to San Francisco, where her family lived, to attend the funeral of her father.
During the period when Modotti was in San Francisco with her family, Weston visited his sister May and her husband in Middletown, Ohio, where they had moved. While staying with them he made a photograph of the American Rolling Mill Company that marked his transition from pictorialism to modernism. Weston framed the steel mill close up from below, filling the frame with the strong vertical columns of the smoke stacks crossed by the dark horizontals of thick pipes. The image was in sharp focus; the tones were crisp blacks, whites, and grays. It was pure form, cold and austere, rendering an industrial plant as an object of aesthetic beauty, not an engine of economic progress. Several years later in his Daybook, Weston remarked the change in his approach to photography from pictorialism to modernism: “Once my aim was to interpret a mood, now to present the thing itself.” (Daybook, v.2 p.79 October 2, 1928) This principle also underlay the poetics of the modernist William Carlos Williams, who had famously declared in his poem Paterson “No ideas but in things.”
Weston’s new vision was reinforced when, with financial help from May and her husband, he continued on to New York, where he met with Stieglitz, Sheeler, and Strand. Stieglitz, like Weston, had a lover-muse who was also an artist—Georgia O’Keeffe. Weston showed some of his prints to Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, who commented on them, singling out the Aramco image for special praise. He also looked at their work, and was especially moved by Stieglitz’s nude studies of O’Keeffe, and her simple, stark painting of a green apple on a black tray, an image that showed him how universal, abstract forms (a circle and a sphere) could be discovered in ordinary objects. After a seven-week stay in New York during which he rekindled an affair with the dancer Jo Kellogg, Weston returned to Glendale to prepare for a trip to Mexico with Modotti. He planned to take his son Chandler with him. He and Flora were now living apart, she in their house, he in his studio.
Weston’s departure for Mexico with Modotti and Chandler was originally scheduled for March 2023, but was delayed numerous times for a variety of reasons that became a cause for joking amongst Weston’s friends. Regardless of the ostensible impediments, the underlying reason may have been Weston’s conflict about leaving his family for his camera and his lover. He wrote a letter to Stieglitz that exposed his dilemma.
To reconcile a certain side of one’s life to another—to accept a situation without at the same time destroying another—to coordinate desires which pull first this way—then that—to know or try to know what is best for those one has brought into the world—and even knowing—to be able to do that “best” without satisfying yourself—looms as an almost hopeless problem—and makes one wonder the “why” of this whole mad life—
I feel myself in a critical period of readjustment—change—and yet through it all in the ever increasing urge to lose myself in work—I may have been overwhelmed at times—faltered—made mistakes—but I have never lost the desire to grasp that intangible something which haunts my ground glass—It almost seems at times I must be cruel—or else give up my own desires—for there are those whom one has loved—still love—and though they stimulate—they also drag—hold back—involve—destroy a certain singleness of purpose—clutter up the background—barricade the foreground—until I wonder if I am a weakling because I stand it or for the same reason very strong! . . . (Warren Artful Lives, p. 290 – Letter to Alfred Stieglitz, July 12, 1923 AS/GO Archive, Yale)
When the day for departure finally did arrive, Weston was seen off at the port by Flora, Brett, Neil, and Cole. Mather was not there. Weston later learned from his friend Ramiel McGehee of the anguish felt by his family at his leaving. Brett was especially despondent. “I felt so sorry for him the day you left—he felt your going more than anyone—there was nothing left for him to cling to—only blind unreasoning woe—he knew something inexplicable was happening and as long as it was unexplainable—why should it happen?” Cole later recalled being “left on the damn dock – – – it was more than I could handle.” (Maddow, p.116) From Mexico, Weston wrote his family trying to justify the rupture and gloss over the nature of his relationship with Modotti.
Let me repeat what I once told you—that it was I who planned the whole trip—upon hearing that she [Modotti] intended coming here to live—I saw my opportunity—just as I did when Robo was alive and was to share his studio—a fine friendship exists between Tina and myself—nothing else. (Maddow, p. 96)
With Flora, Weston attempted to maintain the fiction that his relationship with Modotti was strictly professional. She would serve as his assistant and, with her knowledge of Spanish, facilitate his work in Mexico. In exchange for these services, Weston would teach her photography. But of course Flora was not fooled. Weston was duplicating with Modotti the relationship he had formed with Mather, a pattern that would continue throughout his life.
Modotti was ten years younger than Weston, and at 5’1”, a good physical match for the diminutive photographer. She was born August 16, 1896 in Udine, an ancient commercial town in northeast Italy, near the border with Austria. At the time of her birth, Udine was a center of conflict between the populace and the monarchy. Modotti’s father, Giuseppe, worked as a mechanic and was active in the socialist movement that had also attracted Benito Mussolini. Her mother Assunita was a tailor. The family included seven children.
In August 1905 Giuseppe emigrated to the United States, living first in Pennsylvania with his brother before settling permanently in San Francisco. In stages, he brought the rest of his family to live with him. As a teenager in Udine, Tina was employed as a silk spinner. She also spent considerable time in the photographic studio of her uncle Pietro, who had gained an international reputation for his portraits. In June 1913 she emigrated to the United States, joining her family in San Francisco, which at the time was home to a large Italian population. She worked first as seamstress for a department store, but her sensuous beauty was noticed and before long she was modeling clothes for I. Magnin. She also performed in Italian theatricals.
In 1915 she met Robo, who introduced her to the bohemian world of San Francisco. In 1917, presenting themselves as a married couple, Modotti and Robo moved to Los Angeles, where their home became a gathering place for the city’s bohemian crowd. It was probably at one of their salons that Modotti and Weston met.
As the ship transporting Modotti and Weston to Mexico steamed south from Los Angeles, Weston made an entry in his Daybook that expresses his relief at shedding the burdens and responsibilities of life with Flora.
At last we are Mexico bound, after months of preparation, after such endless delays that the proposed adventure seemed but a conceit of the imagination never actually to materialize. Each postponement became a joke to our friends and a source of mortification to us. But money had to be raised, and with rumors of my departure many last minute sittings came in, each securing our future. Nor was it easy to uproot oneself and part with friends and family—there were farewells that hurt like knife thrusts.
But I adapt myself to change—already Los Angeles seems part of a distant past. The uneventful days—the balmy air has relaxed me—my overstrained nerves are eased. I begin to feel the actuality of this voyage. (Daybook v.1, p. 13 July ?, 1923)
The Mexico that awaited Modotti and Weston was still in the throes of turmoil caused by the years of revolution that began in 1910 with the ouster of the dictator Porfirio Diaz by Francisco Madera. The revolution lasted ten years, and was marked by treachery, assassinations, guerilla warfare led by Pancho Villa in the north and Emilio Zapata in the south, and numerous changes of leadership.
Alvaro Obregón became President of Mexico in 1920 and sought to end the factionalism that had disrupted life in Mexico for a decade. He implemented land reform, increased the education budget, promoted literacy, and encouraged cultural nationalism. His policies gave rise to the mural movement led by Diego Rivera, José Orozco, and David Siqueiros that celebrated Mexican history and championed the goals of the revolution. All of these artists would play important roles in the careers of Modotti and Weston.
Although Obregón had stabilized Mexico, when Modotti and Weston arrived in August 1923 he faced a political and military challenge from his Minister of Finance, Adolfo de la Huerta. Obregón secured his hold on power by negotiating a treaty with the United States that provided reparations for land and property taken under an article of the 1917 constitution. By recognizing US holdings established before 1917, the treaty gained Mexico diplomatic recognition from the United States, thus opening the door to further foreign investment. De la Huerta objected to the treaty and launched a rebellion against Obregón that got underway not long after Modotti and Weston settled into their apartment in Mexico City. Three days before they sailed from Los Angeles, Pancho Villa was assassinated while driving his car down a street in the city of Parral, Chihuahua. Mexico’s turbulent politics were a continuous backdrop for the artistic activities of Modotti and Weston while they lived there together, and affected them in radically different ways.
Modotti, Chandler, and Weston reached Mexico on August 4, when their ship docked at Mazatlan. They went ashore, and Weston recorded his first impressions in his Daybook. “We found life both gay and sad—sharp clashes of contrasting extremes, but always life—vital, intense, black and white, never gray.” (Daybook, v.1 p. 14 August 4, 1923) They disembarked in Manzanillo, then took the train to Mexico City, arriving there on August 11. Their first residence was in Tacubaya, a forty-minute trolley ride from the center of the city. Weston made one of his first Mexican photographs there, Tina in left profile, sitting on the doorstep of their house, dressed in black, gazing pensively out of the frame. Weston described the simplicity of his room in terms that echo both the austerity of his lifestyle and the pure aesthetic formality of his photographs: “A whitewashed room; the furniture shall be black, the doors have been left as they were, a greenish blue, and then in a blue Puebla vase I’ll keep red geraniums.” (Daybook, v.1 p. 17 August 4, 1923)
After a month they moved to an apartment in Mexico City, having discovered that Tacubaya had no phone service, without which they could not conduct the business of the portrait studio that would be their principal source of support.
Modotti had been to Mexico twice before. In 1920 she performed the role of a Mexican servant in the Hollywood movie Tiger’s Coat that was partially filmed in Mexico. And in 1922 she spent a month there managing the exhibition of Weston’s and Mather’s photographs that Robo had organized before he died. She spoke Spanish and knew some of the important artists and political figures who were reshaping Mexico’s culture under Obregón’s government. She took Weston to view the murals of Diego Rivera, and introduced the two men. Rivera became an enthusiastic supporter of Weston’s work, and Weston in turn photographed Rivera’s wife Lupe in a famous heroic portrait.
They also attended a corrida, whose elegant and brutal ritual fascinated Weston. He brushed aside the suffering of the horses and the bull as unavoidable for the nobler symbolism of the event. “The blood and suffering are but means to an end—like the music—the color—the hot sun—the bellowing bull—that of aesthetic gratification. Yes, I shall go again.” (Daybook, v.1 p. 29 October 30, 1923) Weston’s certainty of the supremacy of aesthetics over other values was reflected in the priorities of his own life, in which all considerations were subordinate to the demands of his art.
Weston and Modotti had been in Mexico less than a month when his romantic attachment to her began to fray. On September 1 he wrote in his Daybook, “Barefoot, kimono-clad, Tina ran to me through the rain—but something has gone from between us. Curiosity, the excitement of conquest and adventure is missing. ‘Must desire forever defeat its end?’” (Daybook, v. 1 p. 20 September 1, 1920) Weston sought in his relationships with women the same thrill he felt when discovering a beautiful image on his ground glass. Once the image was fixed and printed, he moved on to a new subject, seeking to replicate the joy of first discovery. A steady, predictable, dependable relationship, such as he had with Flora, brought on creative death.
Weston began a light romance with Elisa Guerrero, a pretty young woman, sister of Xavier Guerrero, an artist and political radical whom Modotti had known in Los Angeles and may have romanced. Modotti was open to sexual relations with men, a feature of her character that made Weston jealous. He wrote of her in his Daybook, “There is a certain inevitable sadness in the life of a much-sought-for, beautiful woman, one like Tina especially, who not caring sufficiently for associates among her own sex, craves camaraderie and friendship from men as well as sex love.” (Daybook, v. 1 p.58 March 23, 1924)
Modotti’s connections in Mexico City helped Weston establish his artistic presence there. She arranged an exhibition of his photographs at the Aztec Land Gallery. The exhibit opened on October 30 and drew large crowds, including Rivera and his wife. Weston sold eight prints, six of which were nudes of Mather. Weston was delighted with his reception by the artistic community of the city. “I have never before had such an intense and understanding appreciation – – – Yet viewing my work day after day on the walls has depressed me greatly, for I know how few of them are in any degree satisfying to me, how little of what is within me has been released.” (Daybook, v.1 p.25 October 30, 1923)
Modotti and Weston were supporting themselves with studio work, supplemented by occasional sales of Weston’s prints. Although they lived near the poverty level, they afforded a servant, Elisa, who kept house for them in exchange for room and board and fifteen pesos ($7.50) per month. They were often short of funds and behind in their rent. Weston wrote periodically to Flora requesting money, which she provided from her income as a schoolteacher. Once they borrowed money from Elisa, who had been saving her salary. Yet they led a busy social life, holding weekly open houses at their apartment and spending evenings at the home of Tomas Braniff, a wealthy Mexican who patronized the arts. In May 1924 they moved again, to a cheaper apartment in a less desirable part of the city.
Weston and Modotti were photographing continuously around the city and on excursions into the countryside. Weston found plentiful subject matter, though he shunned the conventionally picturesque. “Life is intense and dramatic, “ he wrote. “I do not need to photograph premeditated postures, and there are sunlit walls of fascinating surface textures, and there are clouds! They alone are sufficient to work with for many months and never tire.” (Daybook, v.1 p. 20 September 1, 1923)
In addition to this ordinary subject matter that surrounded him and that he sought to transform into abstract shapes, Weston made portraits of their Mexican friends: the painters Diego Rivera, Rafael Sala, and Jean Charlot, the general Manuel Hernández Galván who took them on shooting expeditions, D.H. Lawrence, Dr. Atl (Gerardo Murillo), the theoretician behind Mexico’s mural movement, and his lover Nahui Olin, among others. And he made many photographs of Modotti, capturing both her beauty and her melancholy. He described “Tina With Tear” in his Daybook: “She leaned against the whitewashed wall. I drew close – – -and kissed her. A tear rolled down her cheek—and then I captured forever the moment.” (Daybook, v. 1 p. 46 January 30, 1924) This comment conveys the magic of photography for Weston—its ability to turn a fleeting moment of time into art.
He made a number of nude studies of Modotti, taken on the rooftop of their apartment, where she liked to sunbathe. In the most famous one, clearly erotic, she lies on her back, her arms folded under her rib cage, pushing it up to add sculptural lines flowing from the shape of her breasts. She stretches languidly across the frame, her head in the lower left corner, her legs cropped above the knees in the upper right hand corner. Her head is turned sideways, chin resting on her right shoulder. Her eyes are closed, as though she has removed herself from the scene and surrendered her body to the voyeuristic gaze of the camera. Weston presents her to us as a beautiful object to be ravished by our eyes.
As he photographed in Mexico, Weston’s modernist aesthetic solidified. “The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh – – – The approach to photography is through realism.” (Daybook, v. 1 p.55 March 6, 1924)
Modotti made rapid progress as Weston’s apprentice. Her early photographs of flowers and church interiors show the influence of Weston’s formalist aesthetic, but her images are softer, more sensuous, lighter in tone. She photographed Weston with his camera, and made portraits of their friends Jean Charlot and Carleton Beals that bring out the sensitivity of her subjects. Over time, Modotti’s eye was drawn to human subjects in social settings through which she could convey her empathy for Mexico’s underclass. She made photographs of a woman nursing, of a laborer’s rough hands on the handle of a shovel, of battered feet in worn sandals, of a workers’ parade. She was at pains to justify the social dimension of her photography to the formalist Weston. “I cannot—as you proposed to me ‘solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art’ – – -there should be an even balance of both elements while in my case life is always struggling to predominate and art naturally suffers.” (Lowe, p. 26) This divergence in their views of the function of photography reflected a similar divergence in their views of the useful life. Weston was devoted to the art of his camera; Modotti’s response to the suffering she saw around her in Mexico was radical political activism. This divergence was one of the factors that would ultimately separate them.
By the middle of 1924 Weston was questioning whether he should remain in Mexico. Modotti’s promiscuity—at night lovers came to her room adjoining Weston’s in their apartment—was causing him distress. He was wearying of the struggle for money, and troubled by Mexico’s political instability. But most of all he missed his children. “I am most assuredly not mentally calm. The ghosts of my children haunt, their voices, their very accents ring in my ears. Cole’s merry laugh, Neil’s wistful smile, and blue-eyed Brett’s generous gestures. Some solution must come; I need them, they need me.” (Daybook, v. 1 p.57 March 6, 1924) He planned to return to California in July, but delayed the trip until December. In the interim, he exhibited new work at the Aztec Land Gallery and held a joint show with Modotti at Palacio de Minéria. He and Chandler left by train on December 28. In his absence, Modotti would run the studio, as Mather was doing in Glendale while he remained in Mexico.
After Weston returned to Glendale, he and Flora lived apart, he in their house with the boys, she at her parents’ home, which was empty. The gloom that had driven him to Mexico quickly revived, and he resolved to return there. His incompatibility with Flora, and his antagonism towards the culture of Los Angeles, alienated him. Of Flora he had written in his Daybook, while waiting for a money order from her to arrive, “Yes, Flora, you are generous and you mean so well, and you have written me so beautifully. But when I think of living in the same house with you, or near you, my reactions are definite. It cannot be. Yet—I wish to be near my children—The desire is strong.” (Daybook, v.1 p. 48 February 6, 1924) He had also recorded his contempt for the city where he had built his life and photographic career. “Give me Mexico, revolutions, small-pox, poverty, anything but the plague spot of America—Los Angeles. All sensitive, self-respecting persons should leave there. Abandon the city of uplifters.” (Daybook, v. 1 p. 43 January 1, 1924)
In February Weston went to San Francisco, taking Neil with him. He attempted to support himself with studio portrait sittings, but met with small success. He visited the Modotti family, and photographed Tina’s sister Mercedes nude. He re-established contact with Johan Hagemeyer, then living down the coast in Carmel, and exhibited with him in a show at Gump’s department store that failed to bring sales. Neil, bored, returned to Los Angeles, and in June Weston followed. Before he left, he burned his journals covering the years of his collaboration with Mather, an act he later regretted.
Back in Los Angeles, Weston photographed and conducted affairs with Miriam Lerner and Christel Gang. Lerner was a former girlfriend of Hagemeyer. Weston had met her before leaving for Mexico and began a relationship with her shortly after he and Chandler returned. He met Christel Gang at an exhibition of his work held at the Japanese Club in Los Angeles in August. He maintained relationships with both women for several years, corresponding with Lerner after she moved to Paris. On August 21, deeply dissatisfied with the outcome of his eight-month stay in California, Weston sailed again for Mexico, this time bringing Brett with him. After his arrival in Mexico, Weston summarized in his Daybook the photographic output of his time in California. “The majestic old boats at anchor in an estuary across from San Francisco, Neil who, naked, seems most himself, the full bloom of Miriam’s body, responsive and stimulating, the gripping depths of Johan’s neurasthenia, —the all-over pattern of huddled houses beneath my studio window on Union Street—in these varied approaches I have lately seen life through my camera.” (Daybook, v.1, p. 129 August 21, 1925)
Modotti and the servant girl Elisa met them in Guadalajara, where, at the State Museum, Modotti had arranged a joint show of their work that was glowingly reviewed by the muralist David Siqueiros. In Weston’s absence, Modotti had continued to run their studio, but her focus had shifted to political activity. Her apartment became a meeting place for the city’s artists, intellectuals, and activists, including Xavier Guerrero, who became her lover. Guerrero was a member of the Communist Party. Through him, Modotti became involved with International Red Aid, a leftist version of the Red Cross. She also wrote for El Machete, a workers and peasants newspaper founded by Siqueiros, Rivera, and Guerrero that became the official publication of Mexico’s Communist Party. She continued her photography, but put her camera in the service of social concerns—the plight of workers and the poor, the status of women. She also posed nude for a Rivera mural and may have become his lover, according to her biographer Letizia Argenteri. Argenteri observed of Modotti, “In Tina’s heart and mind there was a vacuum that the Communist Party filled as no man could ever fill. The Party gave her a sense of belonging and a sense of identity.” (Argenteri p. 98)
At Weston’s return to life in Mexico with Modotti, the basis of their relationship had shifted from romance to friendship and professional collaboration. Weston began an affair with a young Indian girl who had come to live with them, Elena, the sister of their housekeeper Elisa. It was during this period that Weston produced his famous photograph of the porcelain toilet that has become one of his most iconic images. He spent months photographing the “excusado” in their apartment, experimenting with different camera angles, lighting conditions, and backgrounds. He fretted that someone in the apartment would need to use the toilet just as the right image appeared on his ground glass. He was searching for pure form in a prosaically utilitarian object.
As do many of Weston’s still lifes—especially his later studies of vegetables—his presentation of the toilet invites comparisons with the human form. The front of the toilet supporting the bowl looks strikingly like a male human torso—upper chest, abdomen, pelvis, upper thighs. The bowl rests on it like a giant sombrero. The toilet gleams white, like marble, against the dark mosaic tile floor. The volumes of the bowl and the stand call to mind the sculptures of Brancusi and Jean Arp. Weston remarked the similarities between the toilet and the human form in his Daybook. “Here was every sensuous curve of the ‘human form divine’ but minus the imperfections.” (Daybook, v. 1 p. 132 October 3, 1925)
Weston found perfection in the human form with a nude study he made of Anita Brenner, an anthropologist investigating Mexican cultural history. He photographed her from behind against a black background, bent over as though in child’s pose. Her body takes on the shape of a pear, pure abstraction. The crease in her buttocks is the only evidence that we are looking at a human figure. Weston was thrilled with the image. “I am seldom so happy as I am with the pear-like nude of A. I turn to it again and again. I could hug the print in sheer joy. It is one of my most perfect photographs.” (Daybook, v. 1 p. 147 January 15, 1926) Weston’s delight in abstracting the human form reveals how far his aesthetic had diverged from the work of Modotti, who was photographing people she encountered on the street, emphasizing their individuality and social context. In Mexico, Weston’s eye sought form; Modotti’s heart found compassion.
Modotti went to San Francisco in December to attend her ailing mother. Shortly after her return in March, Weston was approached by Brenner to accompany her on a tour of Mexico photographing culturally significant decorative arts, many of which were to be found in churches. Weston was tiring of Mexico and planned to leave at the conclusion of the tour. The tour was delayed by postponement of Weston’s payment from the National University, which was sponsoring the project. Weston was contracted to produce four hundred prints. He was also making photographs for a book Brenner was co-authoring with Alfonso Pallares on decorative arts. The book was published in 1929 as Idols Behind Altars.
The Mexico tour was arduous. They were plagued with bad weather, and social unrest interfered with the work. The Cristeros Rebellion had erupted, a reaction against anti-clerical laws in the 1917 constitution that weakened the Catholic Church. The Church responded by refusing to provide religious services, enraging worshippers. Though carrying letters of introduction from the University, Weston, Modotti, and Brenner were often met with suspicion and distrust when they sought to enter churches throughout the country to photograph decorative features.
Weston was becoming increasingly disillusioned with Mexico in the wake of the murder of his friend Galván, shot in a Mexico City tavern. During a stay in Guadalajara, where violence erupted, Weston wrote in his Daybook, “Mexico breaks one’s heart. Mixed with the love I had felt was a growing bitterness, a hatred I tried to resist. I have seen faces, the most sensitive, tender faces the gods could possibly create, and I have seen faces to freeze one’s blood, so cruel, so savage, so capable of any crime.” (Daybook, v. 1 p. 184 June 3, 1926)
At the conclusion of the tour in August, Weston worked doggedly to print all his negatives so he could collect his final payment and leave Mexico. He attended one last corrida on October 25, then left by train with Brett on November 9. Tina saw them off at the station. Weston recorded their parting in his Daybook.
The leaving of Mexico will be remembered for the leaving of Tina. The barrier between us was for the moment broken. Not till we were on the Paseo in a taxi rushing off for the train did I allow myself to see her eyes. But when I did and saw what they had to say, I took her to me—our lips met in an endless kiss, only stopped by a gendarme’s whistle. – – – This time, Mexico, it must be adiós forever. And you, Tina? I feel it must be forever too. (Daybook, v.1 p. 202 November 9, 1926)
Weston never saw Tina again, but they corresponded until her death in 1942.
Weston lived with Flora and the children on his return, and took up work again in his studio. But strains with Flora quickly resurfaced, and he regretted resuming his old way of life. “I should never have returned to my past,” he wrote in his Daybook. “But the boys brought me back here, and here I will stay until I can make some positive, constructive move.” (Daybook, v. 1 p. 3 January 27, 1927) He renewed his affair with Christel Gang and photographed her nude. He also began an affair with Kathleen, “tall and fair with gold-brown hair, hazel eyes, lovely and 21.” Mather came to the studio and yielded to him, though Weston observed that she had been drinking. In February he exhibited photographs at UCLA and was subsequently approached by Bertha Waddell, a dancer who, moved by his images, offered to pose for him. He photographed her nude in various poses, and soon they became lovers. He was also sleeping with Elena, the young Indian girl, who had moved to Los Angeles with Elisa and their mother. Elena worked as a maid for Bertha Waddell. Once, three of Weston’s current lovers came to his studio on the same day, though fortunately at different times. Weston saw them as gifts that fecundated him. “Women are presented to me in abundance so that I may suffer from no inhibitions! I never think of them—nor search them out—for they always appear at the right moment. This is well for my work. How different from those years in Mexico!” (Maddow, p. 157)
Weston continued to refine his aesthetic through pursuit of pure, abstract forms in photographs that he made of the female body, and of ordinary objects such as shells, fruits, and vegetables. Always he looked to the natural world. Of his nudes he remarked, “These simplified forms I search for in the nude body are not easy to find, nor record when I do find them. (Daybook, v. 2 p. 10 March 24, 1927)
During the UCLA exhibit, Weston had met the painter Henrietta Shore, who invited him to her studio. There he discovered her paintings of shells. She loaned him chambered nautiluses, which he took great pains to photograph in very long exposures that would bring out their luminescence. He sent prints of the shell photographs to Modotti along with a letter explaining their significance for him. “It is this very combination of the physical and the spiritual in a shell like the chambered nautilus which makes it such an important abstract of life – – – I knew that I was recording from within, my feeling for life, as I had never had before.” (Maddow, p. 150)
Modotti showed the prints to their painter friends in Mexico. She reported that Orozco said, “This suggests much more ‘The hand of God’ than the hand Rodin made.” (Maddow, p. 150) She noted that one of his compositions had made everyone think of the sexual act. She was referring to an image in which Weston had placed one shell inside the fold of another, so that they appeared coupled, their pearly surfaces looking like human skin. Weston denied any erotic intention, but no one believed him.
He also photographed a cantaloupe and a pumpkin, seeing them as sculpted forms rather than food. “Now I want to see the eternal, basic quintessence each object has and its relation to the great whole,” he wrote. (Daybook, v. 2 p. 46 January 5, 1928) Weston was seeking through his photography a mystical connection to the timeless phenomena of the natural world. But Weston was also a sensualist. “Tonight my pumpkin will achieve its final glorification, in a pumpkin pie. (Daybook, v. 2 p. 46 January 4, 1928) His final act of union with the pumpkin bears comparison with his carnal relationships with many of his models.
Despite his progress with his art, Weston was struggling in his personal life. Relations with Flora remained tense, and he worried that their incompatibility would impair his work. In August, he made a dark entry in his Daybook.
I am deeply concerned about the return of my old bitterness: it will distort or destroy all that is creatively fine within. I thought I could stand her proximity—that I was strong enough, but I am being gradually undermined again. We should be miles apart, for her sake as well, for I know I have the same effect upon her. I would never want to hear of her again, —not even see her handwriting on an envelope: that dreaded handwriting!
But the boys?! (Daybook, v. 2 p. 33 August 6, 1927)
A series of mishaps drove him out. Flora bought a car they could not afford and mortgaged their property to pay for it. When Cole fell from a tree and broke his wrists, Weston became his caregiver, taking him away from his camera and dark room. Brett, sixteen, ran away from home without saying goodbye, then was picked up by police in Modesto for being truant. Flora was injured in a car accident with Chandler driving and was laid up in bed for six weeks. To raise money, Weston sold his father’s archery bow, a collectors’ item. Cole, recovered from his fall, came down with measles. The stress gave Weston swollen glands in his neck. He wrote despairingly in his Daybook, “Oh, if only I had a little shack somewhere in the desert or wilderness, with no possessions.” (Daybook, v. 2 p. 42 January 25, 1928)
To escape his circumstances, Weston made frequent trips to San Francisco, where he stayed with Hagemeyer. He began an affair with a young woman he met at a party, then discovered he was being used to make her boyfriend jealous. In November 1928 he was contracted by the San Francisco Daily News to photograph prominent citizens in the city. With the funds from this project he arranged to move to Carmel, to a studio Hagemeyer had been using during summers. Brett was to come with him. He spent Christmas in Glendale with his children, then settled in Carmel with Brett on January 17, 1929.
When Weston settled in Carmel, a charming village facing a small wind-swept bay on the Pacific coast in Monterey County, the community was an artists’ colony just beginning to attract tourists. Hagemeyer had established a summer portrait studio there to serve its well-to-do visitors and residents. The poet Robinson Jeffers lived there in
a stone house he had built by the sea. The writer Lincoln Steffens and his wife Ella Winter were residents, as was Harry Leon Wilson, a popular contemporary writer whose works are now forgotten. Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Sinclair Lewis had all been part-time residents. Professors from Stanford and UC Berkeley had summer cottages there. The milieu was intellectual and sophisticated. The surrounding countryside, especially Point Lobos, was beautiful and wild, just what Weston had been seeking. He was optimistic about his prospects. “This new life should bring fresh stimulus to my work,” he wrote in his Daybook a few days after arriving with Brett. (Daybook, v. 2 p. 107 January 17, 1929)
Just after settling in, Weston received disturbing news from Mexico about Modotti. In 1927, following a demonstration in Mexico City against the death sentences for Sacco and Vanzetti, Modotti had joined Mexico’s Communist Party and made her camera a tool of the party’s communication program. Her lover Xavier Guerrero had left for Moscow, and in his absence Modotti began a relationship with Julio Antonio Mella, a communist who had been expelled from Cuba for his anti-government activities. They met at El Machete and soon lived together.
Mella was involved in plotting a coup against the Cuban dictator Gerardo Machado. On the evening of January 10, 1929, as Mella and Modotti were walking home from a meeting, an assassin murdered Mella. Tolerance for Mexico’s Communist Party was waning under the government of Plutarco Calles, who had seized power after the assassination of Alvaro Obregón during the Cristeros Rebellion. Modotti was accused of being an accomplice in the murder of Mella, although there was no evidence linking her to the crime. She was acquitted of involvement in Mella’s death, but the ordeal humiliated her and she withdrew from political activity in Mexico City to the countryside on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. There, she photographed native women and village life. But her harassment by the Mexican authorities would continue, and Weston would continue to receive news about her.
Weston wanted a female companion to live with him and serve as his photographic assistant, assuming the roles that Mather and Modotti had formerly played. Miriam Lerner was in Paris, Christel Gang was not suitable, and Kathleen had turned him down. But in April he met Sonya Noskowiak at a party organized by Hagemeyer, for whom she worked as receptionist. She was eager to learn photography from Weston and was willing to live as his companion. She moved in with him and Brett.
With Sonya in Carmel, Weston settled into a relatively tranquil and highly productive period during which he pared down his photographic aesthetic to the barest essentials. He exhibited widely and his reputation in fine art circles—museums and galleries—grew. Family issues continued to complicate his life, and his need for the embrace of fair young women persisted.
Weston often took his camera to nearby Point Lobos, a dramatic landscape jutting out into Carmel Bay, its rugged shoreline scalloped with small rocky coves where kelp beds flourished, seals and otters cavorted. Cypress trees twisted into fantastic shapes by the sea winds rose from the bluffs. The setting was wild and rich in unusual natural forms. Weston made close-ups with his camera—the roots of cypress trees, tendrils of kelp strewn above the tide line, carcasses of dead birds, rocks and sea foam in tide pools. He recorded in his Daybook his excitement at these discoveries.
There it [kelp] lay unchanged, twisted, tangled, interwoven, a chaos of convoluted rhythms, from which I selected a square foot, organized the apparently complex maze, and presented it, a powerful integration. This was done of course with no manual arrangement—the selection was entirely my viewpoint as seen through the camera. I get a greater joy from finding things in nature, already composed, than I do from my finest personal arrangements. (Daybook, v. 2 p. 146 March 30, 1930)
In the studio, in addition to his commercial portrait work, Weston was photographing peppers and other vegetables, turning them into metaphors for the human form through his lighting and camera angles. In his concentration on pure form, Weston was approaching a mystical relationship with his subjects. “Many of my last year’s peppers – – – take one into an inner reality, —the absolute, —with a clear understanding, a mystic revealment. This is the ‘significant presentation’ that I mean, the presentation through one’s intuitive self, seeing ‘through one’s eyes, not with them’: the visionary.” (Daybook, v. 2 p. 180 July 21, 1930)
Weston sent prints of his peppers to Modotti in Mexico. She showed them to their painter friends and reported their reactions. Rivera was especially affected, breaking into a sweat when he saw them and wondering if Weston were ill. Weston was not ill. He was working from a deep conviction in the fundamental unity of all his subjects, a unity that he sought to make apparent to the viewer through his photographs. “Clouds, torsos, shells, peppers, trees, rocks, smoke stacks, are but interdependent, interrelated parts of a whole, which is Life. Life rhythms felt in no matter what, become symbols of the whole . . . To see the Thing Itself is essential – – – This then. To photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock.” (Daybook, v. 2 p. 154 April 24, 1930)
As Weston pursued his unique vision, interest in his work from the art world grew, and exhibitions were mounted in museums and galleries across the country, and reviewed in mainstream media such as The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, as well as in more specialized art journals.
In July 1930 Weston was visited by Orozco and his New York gallery representative Alma Reed. Weston made a penetrating portrait of Orozco during this visit, and Reed, impressed with Weston’s work, offered to represent him. He sent fifty prints to her Delphic Studios for a show that was well received by New York’s artistic community. Though Reed sold several of his prints, Weston continued to rely on his commercial portrait work for income, a limitation that he struggled with. In December he went to San Francisco to see Diego Rivera, who was painting a mural in the San Francisco Stock Exchange. Rivera was then married to Frida Kahlo, and Weston photographed them standing together in front of the mural.
In February 1930 Weston had received further news about Modotti. After the death of Mella, she had continued her communist activities and formed a relationship with an Italian communist, Vittorio Vidali, whom she had met at the Sacco-Vanzetti protest. In January 1930 the government had outlawed the Mexican Communist Party, and on February 5 the new president, Ortiz Rubio, was shot in the face while riding in his car. Modotti was arrested on February 7 and accused of involvement in the attack. She was imprisoned for ten days, then given a choice between giving up her communist activities or being deported. She chose to leave Mexico and sailed for Europe from Veracruz on February 24. She traveled under the name Carmen Ruiz Sanchez. Vidali joined her when the ship docked in Tampico. She went first to Berlin, where she tried unsuccessfully to restart her photographic career, then moved to Moscow to join Vidali, who was married to a Russian woman and the father of a girl. She became a Soviet agent and worked with Vidali on Party assignments.
Weston’s search for the simplicity in his personal life that he was finding in his photographs was complicated by ongoing family obligations. Shortly after he and Brett had settled in Carmel, Brett suffered a badly fractured leg when a horse he was riding fell on him. After a lengthy recuperation, he returned briefly to Glendale, but was again with Sonya and Weston in September. He had also become a fine photographer, working from the same aesthetic as his father.
In August 1929 Weston had received the news from Flora that Chandler, age nineteen, had married his girlfriend Maxine, age seventeen. On March 24, 1930, Weston’s birthday, their child Edward Frank Weston was born. Neil had come to live with his father in January, and in May Brett returned from a visit to Glendale bringing Cole with him. Tempers flared, and Brett left to pursue his own photographic path. In August 1930 Cole left for Glendale and Chandler, Maxine, and baby Edward arrived. Brett returned at the end of September, bringing his girlfriend.
The stresses in Weston’s family life came to a boil in February 1931. Cole became ill with diphtheria, and Weston went to Glendale to help care for him. Flora’s clumsy management of the sick boy upset both Weston and his other sons. “She is a hard worker, a slave, one who would die for the children, extravagantly generous, but with qualities which lead to utter confusion,” he wrote in his Daybook after his return to Carmel. “The order she so much desires, and could have with half the effort, is dissipated through her most disorderly mind. I return with memories of Chan and Flora roaring at each other, of Brett telling her to ‘shut up’, or paying no attention at all while she chattered or screamed on. In another room Cole calling for help, going into spasms, half brought on by fear, and intensified the moment Flora entered.” (Daybook, v. 2 p. 204 February 21, 1931)
In the spring Weston broke off relations with Hagemeyer and moved his studio and home to the center of town. Domestic problems continued. Sonya and Maxine did not get along, and Weston wanted Chandler to move out with his family. They left in October, Chandler going to Santa Maria to open a portrait studio. Neil and Cole continued to live with Weston and Sonya. Weston longed for a more hermetic existence.
More and more I am absorbed in my life’s work. I have set a goal: when the boys are finally started in life, I will retire. This means I will find an isolated spot as far away from the general public as possible, a place where only those who have a great desire can reach me, and there I will work undisturbed, sending my prints to city markets. I can live on the sale of four prints a month. (Daybook, v. 2 p. 227 October 14, 1931)
As he had done throughout his career, Weston took on lovers to fertilize his work—Lydia, then Sybil, then Xenia. He was untroubled by his promiscuity, and retained his fondness for Sonya (“She has given me the most peaceful ‘married’ life I have ever had.”), but his passion for her had died. “I love Sonya, but only with tenderness, the calm affection of a friend,” he wrote in his Daybook as he pondered the demands of managing four relationships simultaneously. “And that is not enough for most women, not even the most emancipated; they are basically conservative no matter how intellectually radical.” (Daybook, v. 2 p. 268 January 18, 1933)
In April 1934 Weston met Charis Wilson, the nineteen year-old daughter of the writer Harry Leon Wilson, at a concert in Carmel. They were introduced by her brother Leon, who had befriended Weston. She asked to view his work, but when she came to his studio a few days later he was away in Los Angeles. Sonya showed her some of his prints and suggested that Charis pose for him. On April 17 Weston wrote to Sonya that he wanted his freedom. Five days later, following a session during which Charis posed nude for Weston and drank wine with him, they became lovers.
The young photographer Willard Van Dyke, who had studied under Weston and later made a documentary film about him that won an Academy Award, had this to say about Weston’s reliance on women:
He liked women as companions, as sexual objects. His numerous affairs are legendary. He found each new sexual adventure vastly stimulating as far as his work was concerned . . . He needed assurance that he was loved and wanted, and that women were attracted and were satisfied by him. He was very self-centered, as many artists are . . . What he needed and wanted took precedence. (Maddow p. 181)
Weston’s fondness for women extended to frequently dressing as one when he attended social gatherings, to the amusement of all the guests.
Initially, Weston and Charis kept their relationship clandestine. Fearing scandal in the small Carmel community and the disapproval of her parents, Charis came to Weston’s studio in the early hours before dawn for trysts and wrote to him using a code. Sonya elected to stay with Weston despite his declaration of independence, accepting that she was not Weston’s only love. He continued to sleep with her as well as with Charis.
Charis came from a somewhat dysfunctional family. Her father was a successful novelist and playwright absorbed in his work, with little time to spare for his children, who were attended by servants. Her mother, Helen, had given birth to Leon when she was seventeen and not ready to take on the responsibilities of parenthood. Charis was born a year later, on May 5, 1914. Both parents were remote and unaffectionate, according to Charis’s memoir Through Another Lens.
Charis, like Weston, had been sickly as a child, confined to bed with a heart murmur. At age eleven she was sent to a boarding school in San Francisco, where she learned of her parents’ divorce from a friend. She was expelled from the school for being a bad influence on the other girls.
In 1929 she was living in Hollywood with her mother and attending Hollywood High School. She was offered a scholarship to Sarah Lawrence College, but her father refused to supplement it. Instead, she went to secretarial school. She moved to San Francisco to live with a friend, became pregnant, and underwent an abortion from a doctor who was treating her for appendicitis. At the time she met Weston she was adrift, a lonely young woman in need of love.
Weston’s portrait business shrank under the Depression, and in January 1935 he closed his Carmel studio, moved to Santa Monica, and opened a studio there near the beach with Brett. In August, Charis came to Santa Monica and moved in with Weston and Brett. They were soon joined by Neil and Cole, who slept in the garage. Weston was living with his three sons and a mistress their age. Chandler was then living and working in San Francisco, while his son lived with Maxine in Los Angeles.
Weston worried that he would be unable to support himself through photography. A Vogue assignment to photograph Hollywood celebrities brought a temporary reprieve, and yielded portraits of Henry Fonda, Gary Cooper, James Cagney, and Dolores Del Rio. Weston decided to apply for a Guggenheim Fellowship that would allow him to travel through the west photographing landscapes. Charis, who had ambitions to be a writer, helped him craft the application. While they waited for the decision, they traveled to Oceano, where Weston photographed the dunes and made nude studies of Charis that complemented the landforms.
In March 1937 Weston received news that he had been awarded two thousand dollars by the Guggenheim Foundation, the first photographer to be funded by it. The grant was supplemented by a contract from Westways, the Automobile Club magazine, to provide ten photographs a month from his travels for publication. Weston bought a car and camping gear and they set off for the California desert with Cole at the wheel. Their plan was to travel in spurts lasting two to three weeks, return to Glendale with the exposed negatives and develop them in Chandler’s studio, resupply themselves, then set out again. Charis saw her role as being the scribe of the trips, keeping a log of all the negatives and building a narrative of their experiences. She wanted to regard herself as Weston’s equal partner in this adventure, and resented Cole’s presence. After their first excursion to Death Valley, they traveled alone.
Over the course of a year, they crisscrossed the American west, photographing the Mojave and Colorado deserts, Yosemite, the Eastern Sierras, Northern California, Arizona, and New Mexico. Weston grew to trust Charis’s vision, and would rest his eyes while she drove, confident that she would stop at promising viewpoints.
As the end of the award year approached, Weston applied for a renewal of the grant. In March 1938 his request was approved for a second year. Before they set out again, Charis’s father was injured in a car accident. While caring for him, Charis and Leon learned that he was in debt, about to lose his home. His friends rallied to provide him with a small monthly income, and he transferred to Charis and Weston his title to a 1.8 acre property in the Carmel Highlands that the bank had re-possessed. The property was located on a hill overlooking Carmel Bay. They managed to pay off the bank debt, and Neil built them a simple one-room house from pine. He later added a writing studio for Charis. They named their home Wildcat Hill for the numerous feral cats that they adopted.
During the second Guggenheim year, their base of operations shifted from Glendale to Wildcat Hill, and they made shorter trips. They revisited some of their previous destinations—Death Valley and Yosemite—and photographed at a number of other California locations. In April 1939 Weston divorced Flora and married Charis in Elk, Mendocino County. On June 19 Harry Leon Wilson died. Charis and Weston concluded their Guggenheim travels with a journey through the Northwest that included a stop in Vancouver, Canada.
While Weston printed from the hundreds of negatives taken in the course of their two-year odyssey around the American west, Charis wrote the accompanying text. The result of their efforts was published in 1940 as California and the West. Authorship was credited to Charis Wilson Weston and Edward Weston. The book included ninety-six photographs taken by Weston and 122 pages of text written by Charis. The book was well-received, and bolstered Charis’s writing ambitions. “The success of California and the West settled any lingering doubts I had about my value as a partner,” she wrote in her memoir. She also ghost wrote for Weston an article on photography published in the Encyclopedia Britannica. But before long she was disabused of the idea that she could consider herself Weston’s full partner.
In February 1941 Weston was invited by the Limited Editions Club to provide illustrations for a special edition of Walt Whitman’s epic American poem Leaves of Grass. Weston took on the assignment with the understanding that his photographs would not be linked directly to Whitman’s lines, but would convey a parallel vision of America as seen through his lens. The contract gave Weston only one thousand dollars, a budget too small to cover accommodations. Their friend Phil Hanna from Westways plotted a route for them through forty-eight states, and they lined up hospitality from friends along the way wherever they could.
They traveled first into the south, passing through Nevada’s Boulder Dam, the Grand Canyon, El Paso, and White Sands National Monument in New Mexico. In Louisiana a rift opened between them that never healed. Charis saw in the trip another opportunity to exercise her literary skills. But when she suggested a short detour to a location that she wanted to write about, Weston refused to go there, saying that it held no photographic interest for him. When Charis pressed her case he said to her, “It’s my grant,” a remark that opened her eyes to the true nature of their relationship. “Suddenly the picture maker had come unstuck from the man I knew, loved, and trusted. He stood there glaring at me with hostile eyes in which I could read myself a drag, a stumbling block, and worst of all—a stranger.” (Wilson p. 255)
Charis withdrew emotionally from Weston at that moment. Before they reached New York, she had fallen in love with another man encountered on their travels. She had dinner with this man in New York in November, but decided against going to bed with him. “My obligation to Edward included marital fidelity,” she wrote in her memoir. (Wilson p. 289)
During this trip, Tina Modotti died in Mexico at age forty-five. She and Vidali had been assigned at the end of 1934 to work in Spain for International Red Aid. Vidali formed the Fifth Regiment there, a militia force of 10,000 men fighting for the Republican side. Modotti joined the women’s section of the regiment. Vidali acquired a reputation for brutality because of his summary executions of prisoners of war. At the conclusion of the Spanish Civil War she and Vidali moved to Paris. As war loomed, she left for New York, again traveling under the name Carmen Ruiz Sanchez. She was detained by immigration, but allowed to proceed on to Veracruz, where Vidali awaited her. Modotti had given up her membership in the Communist Party in 1939 and the president of Mexico had annulled her expulsion.
Modotti was beaten down from her experiences in the Soviet Union and Spain; her Mexican friends found her depressed and withdrawn. She lived in a small apartment in Mexico City and worked as a translator and as an assistant to two American photographers. On January 6, 1942, while riding in a taxi in Mexico City, she suffered a heart attack and died.
With the United States at war with Germany and Japan, Charis and Weston returned to Wildcat Hill and joined the war effort as volunteers in the Aircraft Warning Service. They were issued gas masks, and Weston made satirical photographs of a nude Charis wearing hers. Weston’s sons entered military service. In July, Charis’s brother Leon was sent to prison for resisting the draft as a conscientious objector without religious affiliation.
Charis gradually drifted away from Weston, who fell into a depression that hindered his work. He antagonized her further when he claimed sole credit for a vegetable garden she had planted and landscaped after their Japanese vegetable farmer was interned. She took a job as a postal carrier and began seeing a therapist, who suggested that the job gave her a reason to be away from Weston.
In December 1944 Charis went to Washington to be with her mother, who was dying from cancer. She visited friends in New York, and while there had a one night stand with a stranger. Her mother died in July.
Charis separated from Weston in the fall, and shortly after she left he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He hoped Charis would remain near him, and suggested they build a second home for her on Wildcat Hill. But Charis moved to Los Angeles to stay with a friend, then went to Northern California to investigate a lumber strike. Like Modotti, she had developed political interests. She met Noel Harris, a twenty-seven year old divorcé with a son being raised by his parents. They traveled together until she settled in Reno, Nevada to establish residency for her divorce from Weston. The divorce was granted on December 13, 1946 and on December 14 she married Harris.
Weston purchased Charis’s share of Wildcat Hill for $10,000, paid in monthly installments of sixty dollars, with no interest. His Parkinson’s disease impaired his ability to take photographs, and in 1948 he exposed his final negative at Point Lobos, though he continued to print. With the departure of Charis, Weston’s romancing and his photographic career came to an end. She was the first and only woman—other than his mother—who ended a relationship with Weston on her own terms, and it seemed to break him. His first love, the camera, was also gone.
After Charis left him, Weston wrote to her brother Leon. “I have set up housekeeping, tried to make a permanent home with a woman four times (Flora, Tina, Sonya, Charis) and failed four times. I’m beginning to think the fault is mine, all mine.” (Wilson, p. 348) In 1954, with Weston’s health deteriorating, Flora came to Carmel to care for him, living in a house that their sons built. Edward Weston died on January 1, 1958. He was cremated, and his ashes were strewn at tide’s edge on a beach at Point Lobos.
Further Reading
Lowe, Sarah M. Tina Modotti & Edward Weston: The Mexico Years. New York: Merrell, 2004.
Maddow, Ben. Edward Weston His Life. New York: Aperture, 1973.
Newhall, Nancy, ed. The Daybooks of Edward Weston. Millerton, NY: Aperture Books, 1961.
Warren, Beth Gates. Artful Lives: Edward Weston, Margrethe Mather and the Bohemians of Los Angeles. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011.
Wilson, Charis. Through Another Lens: My Years with Edward Weston. New York: North Point Press, 1998.
View Edward Weston’s photographs here.
Chapter Three, Coming Soon…
Arthur Hoyle (www.arthurhoyle.com) is the author of The Unknown Henry Miller: A Seeker in Big Sur and Mavericks, Mystics, and Misfits: Americans Against the Grain. He reviews biography for the New York Journal of Books. His Substack newsletter Off the Cuff offers periodic commentary on the American cultural scene. Subscribe at https://arthurhoyle.substack.
