Edward Weston and the Essence of Things: Photography and Metaphysics

Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Photography & Video

Edward Weston and the Essence of Things: Photography and Metaphysics Details

True photographs are illustrations of motives that speak to us in a different way than via their pure aesthetics and in a nagging way want to reveal us some greater depths about the things. But their content and their significance are difficult to grasp. So difficult that they can plunge us in doubt about our work and by those means about ourselves. Photography and Metaphysics is the attempt to rationalize such images, gain insight into their being and fertilize photography by looking at actually unrelated topics. - A kind of self verification, so to speak. This volume does the job by relating Edward Weston‘s idea of the comprehensive wholeness of life as the essence of being with the point of view of the eastern philosophies and then uses the quantum physics to prove that modern science has actually found such an elementary communion of all things.

Reviews

This book is an example of how to do pretty much everything wrong. Absolutely no care was taken in its production.1) This is pretty clearly a translation from the German, though no translator is mentioned. The result is at best clumsy English, at worst incomprehensible. Concerning Edward Weston's early portraits: "This work and his on many salons--international exhibitions--awarded superb prints brought him recognition..." (6). Was the translation made by Google Translate? I don't mean to insult Google, but this hunch is solidified when we read that in New York Weston met photographers such as "Paul Beach." This would be Paul STRAND: the word "Strand" in German means "beach"! "Pictorialism" is sometimes, but not always, spelled, "Piktorialism".2) The book contains a series of color photographs, but no photographer is identified. They are certainly not the work of Edward Weston, whose photography is the alleged topic of the book, so they are presumably the work of the book's author, who clearly thinks his work can illustrate his interpretation, such as it is, of Weston's photography better than Weston's work itself.3) The "substance" of the book is a series of very, very brief and correspondingly superficial sketches of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. This is followed by a sketch of the developments in physics in the 20th Century, which is then identified with the tradition of Eastern mysticism by a wave of the wand in the direction of Fritjof Capra and Hans-Peter Dürr. Finally we learn that "the basic relationships" cannot be understood rationally ("can not be understood rational"), but only through feeling, and Weston's photography is then said to be one way of "creating such an experience of the totality." End of book.Ansel Adams wrote, "Weston believed in the mystical currents of life but never had much patience with those who, by trying to over-analyze them, destroyed them." This book never even gets to the level of analysis, but it is equally destructive. Enough said.

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