Edward Weston 1886-1958

Other prints of this image:

Conger 655

Beaumont Newhall, Supreme Instants: The Photographs of Edward Weston (Center for Creative Photography, 1986, in conjunction with the exhibition), pl. 90

Ben Maddow, Edward Weston: Fifty Years (Aperture, 1973), p. 135

Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Karen Quinn, and Leslie Furth, Edward Weston: Photography and Modernism (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1999), fig. 18

James L. Enyeart, Edward Weston's California Landscapes (Boston, 1984), p. 49

Nancy Newhall, ed., The Daybooks of Edward Weston, Volume II. California (Aperture, 1973), pl. 29

Merle Armitage, The Art of Edward Weston (New York, 1932), p. 32

This print comes originally from the collection of Agnes Ernst Meyer (1887-1970), influential arts patron, author, and mother of Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham.   As a young New York Sun critic in New York in the early 1900s, she met Stieglitz, Steichen, and other artists and writers in the Stieglitz circle.  Her marriage in 1910 to the wealthy banker Eugene Meyer, Jr., allowed her to underwrite such avant-garde publications as Stieglitz's '291,'  where she was an editor, and to collect the work of a number of the twentieth century's most important artists.

Shell and Rock Arrangement was one of nine images by Weston that comprised the original 1932 Group f.64 exhibition at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco.  The exhibition ran from November 15 - December 31, and included works by Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and Willard Van Dyke, among other members of Group f.64.  This show, the first and only that the group would organize, was created in an effort to articulate the members' unified approach to the photographic medium.  Shell and Rock Arrangement, with its sharp focus, strong detail, and great depth of field, illustrates the new, straight style that was the underlying principle of Group f.64.