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Edward Weston exhibition in SFMOMA

There is an exhibition of Edward Weston's photographs ('Last years in Carmel') going on in SFMOMA. Weston's photography changed tenor during those years in Carmel. Gone was the cold detached polish of his earlier works. His images of Point Lobos have a lot more pathos. His nudes of Charis; as their marriage was disintegrating around them, have a lot more intensity than the impersonal geometry of his previous works.

Edward Weston led a full and by the social standards of those days, an unconventional life. But by the early forties, it was taking the shape of a Greek tragedy. He contracted Parkinson's disease in 1944. Charis left him in 1945. In a haunting passage, Janet Malcolm described an incident from Maddow's "Edward Weston: fifty years".

She "cites a horrible incident that occurred three years before his death, when he was already completely immobilized. The thirty cats that Weston had accumulated and had fed with his own hands had got into the house and had started a fight that Weston couldn't deal with and that was wrecking the place. His sons arrived on the scene and chased the animals out, and then Brett took a rifle and systematically killed the cats, one by one, as Weston listened to the shots from inside the house"

Yet, we go back now and look at these expensively framed photographs in the immaculately maintained halls on San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and dont feel pity. We feel awe at how the immenseness of human achievements outlasts the everyday tragedies of human lives.

In case you are planning to go and it matters: there are no entry fees on on the first tuesday of every month in SFMOMA.

Posted by on May 9, 2002 9:21 PM |

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