Edward Weston

titled and dated by the photographer in pencil and with reduction notations in an unidentified hand in orange crayon 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

This print:

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

Other prints of this image:

Conger 1080

Beaumont Newhall, Supreme Instants: The Photographs of Edward Weston (Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, 1986, in conjunction with the exhibition), cat. 153, cat. 67

This print, on double-weight semi-glossy paper, is in generally excellent condition. In raking light, slight silvering is visible in the darkest areas of the print. The corners of the print are lightly creased, and there are small, inconsequential chips at the corners and along the edges. The reverse of the print has a few small areas of very minor surface soiling and light age-darkening.
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Weston took three different photographs of San Francisco's Embarcadero during a trip to that city in August of 1937.  The Embarcadero is a waterfront roadway that lines San Francisco's port on the east side of the city, on San Francisco Bay.  This particular photograph, a long view shot from Telegraph Hill, overlooks the buildings and piers that line the coast below.  By positioning himself well above the Embarcadero, Weston's composition of intersecting angles becomes an exercise in formalism.  The other Embarcadero studies are reproduced in Conger 1081 and 1082.    

This image was included by Weston in his important retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in 1946.  In addition to two prints of the image in the Edward Weston Archive at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson (one a gift of Ansel and Virginia Adams), Conger locates only one other print, a Project Print in Santa Cruz.