Serg
Gallery
The nude woman in this photograph is Charis Wilson, who began working with Edward Weston in 1934 as his driver and model and soon became his lover and wife. “He didn’t give any directions,” Wilson recalled in an interview, “He just said: ‘Go over there and sit down or lie down, or do what you feel like doing and move around all you want. Change your position as you want to.’” Once when Weston was shooting the empty landscape of Oceano Dunes, California, Wilson spontaneously removed her clothes and began to roll in the sand. The ten resulting images, including this picture, are striking for both their bold compositions and their uninhibited display of the female body.
Merle Armitage, Fifty Photographs: Edward Weston (New York, 1947), pl. 21; ‘Edward Weston: Master Photographer, 1886-1958,’ U. S. Camera Annual 1959, p. 58; Nancy Newhall, (Aperture, 1965), p. 65; Ben Maddow, Edward Weston: Fifty Years (Aperture, 1973), p. 267; Amy Conger, (Tucson, AZ: Center for Creative Photography, 1992), fig. 968; Charis Wilson, Edward Weston: Nudes (Aperture, 1993), p. 82; Amy Conger, The Form of the Nude (New York, 2005), p. 97; Theodore Stebbins, Jr., et al., Edward Weston: Photography and Modernism (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1999), pl. 75;; Terence Pitts and Manfred Heiting, Edward Weston 1886-1958 (Taschen, 2004), p. 155; Weston Naef, Photographers of Genius at the Getty (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2004), cover and pl. 85; Brett Abbott, Edward Weston’s Book of Nudes (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007), pl. 39.
The Edward Weston Nude That Took Photography to
EDWARD WESTON (1886–1958)Nude, 1927gelatin silver print, flush-mounted on cardaccompanied by a letter from the artist to the original owner image/sheet/flush mount: 6⁄ x 9⁄ in. (16.5 x 23.5 cm.)
Edward Weston – The Form of the Nude
