Edward Weston

titled and dated by the photographer in pencil and numbered '#19' and with reduction notations in unidentified hands in pencil and orange crayon on the reverse, matted, 1938

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. 48

Alexander Lee Nyerges, Edward Weston: A Photographer's Love of Life (The Dayton Art Institute, 2004, in conjunction with the exhibition), pl. 47

Other prints of this image:

Conger 1339

Karen E. Quinn and Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Weston's Westons: California and the West (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1994, in conjunction with the exhibition), pl. 33, cat. 50

This print, on double-weight paper with a surface sheen, is in generally excellent condition. The corners are bumped, and there is tiny emulsion loss at the tips. There is a small sharp, vertical handling crease at the left edge. When examined in raking light, a very small, soft scuff on the surface, right of center, is visible. It does not break the emulsion and is not visible when viewed under normal conditions.
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The present photograph was taken on a subsequent trip to Death Valley in 1938, while Weston awaited word from the Guggenheim Foundation that would allow a second year of photographing.  Weston was particularly taken with 20-Mule Canyon, which he photographed repeatedly during this second Death Valley trip.  The Canyon could be reached by way of 20-Mule Team Road, a five mile unpaved loop once used by mules transporting borax from mines on the Valley floor.  Charis Wilson notes in California and the West that Weston made nearly half of his Death Valley negatives in the area between 20-Mule Canyon, Zabriskie Point, Corkscrew Canyon, and Golden Canyon (p. 160).  She spoke of the landscape, 'This is the domain of pure erosion.  The forms of the mud-hills have the clarity and precision of textbook diagrams.  There is almost unlimited variety of shape, pattern, texture, and color.  Each hill you climb gives a new accounting of the complex intertexture of cliffs, hills, ridges, gullies, sumps, and dry falls' (ibid., pp. 159-60).

In addition to a print of the image in the Edward Weston Archive at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Conger locates only one other print, a Project Print at Santa Cruz.  There is also a print of this image in the Lane Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.