Edward Weston

mounted, initialed and dated by the photographer in pencil on the mount, titled by him in pencil on the reverse, matted, 1937

The photographer to his sister, Mary Weston Seaman

By descent to her daughter, Jeannette Seaman

By descent to her nephew, John W. Longstreth

The Dayton Art Institute, Edward Weston's Gifts to His Sister, January - March 1978, and traveling to:

New York, International Center of Photography, July - September 1978; and

The Oakland Museum, February - March 1979

The Dayton Art Institute, Edward Weston: A Photographer's Love of Life, February - July 2004, and traveling to:

Oregon, Portland Art Museum, September - November 2004

Omaha, Joslyn Art Museum, January - April 2005; and

Rochester, George Eastman House, April - September 2005

This print:

Kathy Kelsey Foley, Edward Weston's Gifts to His Sister (The Dayton Art Institute,1978, in conjunction with the exhibition), p. 49

Alexander Lee Nyerges, Edward Weston: A Photographer's Love of Life (The Dayton Art Institute, 2004, in conjunction with the exhibition), pl. 36

This early print, with an impressive range of gray tones, is on paper with a semi-glossy surface and is mounted to a thick buff-colored board. It is in generally excellent condition. There is a tiny nick at the upper edge at the left, and a very small crease at the upper right corner that likely occurred prior to mounting. In raking light, age-appropriate silvering is visible, as well as tiny deposits of the photographer's original retouching and a few pencil-point indentations and faint hairline scratches that do not break the emulsion. These are negligible. The mount, trimmed to within one inch of the photograph, exhibits age-darkening, and its corners are bumped, with creasing in the upper right corner. On the reverse of the mount, there is a small piece of cellulose tape with an adjoining abrasion.
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The April 1937 trip to Death Valley marked the first of Weston's Guggenheim trips.   The month before, in March 1937, Weston had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the first photographer to receive this honor.   In his fellowship application, he described his project thus:  'I wish to continue an epic series of photographs of the West, begun about 1929' (quoted in Conger, p. 30).

 After an arduous journey in 'Heimy'--the new Ford V-8 Sedan purchased especially for the Guggenheim travels--Weston and Charis Wilson arrived in Death Valley.  Weston was immediately struck by the desolate landscape, and Zabriskie Point, in particular, which was a favorite spot for tourists and snapshooters alike.  Charis spoke of her first impressions in California and the West: '. . . the effect was something like standing on the stage of an outdoor theater and looking up at the tiers of seats.  But here you looked up at, and out over, ridge on ridge of bright-colored mud-hills, red, yellow, brown, and a hundred intermediate shades all of which, changed with the light from hour to hour' (p. 25).  

Conger notes that Weston produced four 'deceptively similar' negatives at Zabriskie Point.  An exceedingly close variant is reproduced in Conger 988.  At the time of this writing, no other prints of the present image have been located.