Edward Weston: A Photographer's Love of Life

Hartford, Conn.

:The Modernist photographer Edward Weston (1886–1958) may be best known for his voluptuous 1936 odalisque "Nude on Sand, Oceano," depicting his muse and second wife, Charis Wilson, propped on one elbow in the dunes, her back turned to his lens. The sensuous image helped secure Weston's reputation as a libertine, faithful only to his art. The myth is one that Alexander Lee Nyerges dispels in "Edward Weston: A Photographer's Love of Life" on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum through December 31.

Organized by Nyerges, director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts since August, the exhibition of vintage palladium and gelatin silver prints, color transparencies, family snapshots and letters opened at the Dayton Art Institute before making a nationwide tour. In 2005, it was shown at George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., where Nyerges, a photography buff whose prior study of Ansel Adams prepared him for his work on Weston, spent afternoons as a teen.

In the catalog accompanying the exhibition, Nyerges explains that Weston's life "is one of near mythic proportions: a series of love affairs, sojourns to Mexico with the exotic Tina Modotti, a spartan lifestyle — truly the elements of which legends are made. Yet behind the exaggerated stories and tales of the frequently misjudged artist stands a man driven by passion, deep emotion and a unique eye. Although introspective, he was not the dark, brooding, bohemian intellectual and lover as he was often portrayed, but a man possessed by a relentless drive to seek beauty, perfection and emotionally charged images."

The real Edward Weston, says Nyerges, was "a humble family man," devoted in his own way to his children, even if flagrantly unfaithful to their mother, Weston's first wife. Nyerges's argument is bolstered by the current display, at whose core is a collection of photographs and documents saved by Weston's grandnephew, Jack Longstreth, grandson of Weston's sister Mary, arguably the most influential woman in the photographer's life.

Mary Weston Seaman became a surrogate mother to Weston after their mother died when the photographer was only 5. She invited her brother, whose youth was spent mainly in Chicago, to join her in California when he was 20. Mary promoted his photographic career, which initially consisted of commercial work.

When Jack Longstreth visited his grandmother in California, he pored over photographs and relics of his famous great-uncle's career, lovingly saved by Mary. When she died in 1952, Jack retrieved the archives, bringing them home to Dayton. Longstreth first met Edward Weston at his grandmother's house in the 1930s, but did not see him again until the Museum of Modern Art in New York City organized a retrospective of the photographer's work in 1946. Nyerges met Longstreth when he was director of the Dayton Art Institute, a post Nyerges held until earlier this year.

"In 1993, I offered Jack the opportunity to store the collection at the Dayton Art Institute in a secure, climate controlled facility," Nyerges recalls. Half of the archive was subsequently given to the museum; the rest remains on loan.