Madrid,
After his samples of Felipe Romero Beltrán and José Guerrero, the photography classics return to Mapfre Foundation, now at their Madrid headquarters. Under Sergio Mah’s commissioner, this center teaches us two hundred photographs of Edward Weston, in a tour that reviews his legacy in terms of concepts and aesthetics from the point of view of the European gaze.
Weston was born in Illinois in 1886, he received his first camera from his father at sixteen and, since his first film roll, he took the photograph seriously, so much so that he had already published a book with them at twenty. In 1906 he went to visit his sister to California and stayed there, dedicating himself to this discipline professionally: in 1911 he opened The Little Studio In Tropico (today the Glendale area) and, a decade later, he began to develop the modernist approach for which he would acquire recognition, after affirming his love for the previous visualization of direct photography. Get the correct lighting and exposure from the beginning and both the development and the copy will be practically automatiche said.
If his contemporary Renger-Patzsch, Mah said, was a photographer fundamentally for the industry, in Weston we found first and foremost a photographer for California, for his deserts and his rocks.
It was the start of a journey that would place it among the first defenders of the photo as art (along with Paul Strand or Stieglitz): very early he knew how to understand this artist that the camera allowed to capture more than scenes and events, which could suspend beauty, pain and other aesthetic qualities in the same way that sculpture or painting could do.
Through a meticulous handling of the framing, the elimination of anecdotes and the analysis of their reasons, Weston tried that, by exploring the expressive possibilities of two -dimensionality of the photographic medium, abstraction could be rubbed; and that, in fact, it was not opposed to figuration, but a next step in its development.
In those inquiries, vegetables were very useful. The exhibition at the Foundation is part of its Pepper No. 30image that took, precisely, in the summer of 1930 and that transcends, with much, the visual representation of the food, how he knew very well to explain: It is a classic, fully satisfactory, a pepper, but more than a pepper; abstract, in the sense that there is completely outside the subject. He has no psychological attributes, does not awaken human emotions: this new pepper leads him to one beyond the world we know in the conscious mind.
The production of Weston, co -founder of the collective pioneer F/64, can have a high pedagogical value when teaching the aesthetic dimension of photography, but they also have it, as we see, their words.
This new pepper leads to one beyond the world we know in the conscious mind.
By the time he photographed that pepper, he had already discovered the benefits of Mexico for his work: there he had traveled in 1923, accompanied by his son Chandler and Tina Modotti, and had opened a study. At the end of the twenties he also undertook a relevant series of nudes, photographed the ocean dunas, in California, and took one of his most widespread photos: the nude of what would be his second wife, Charis Wilson.
In his American exhibitions, the commissioner pointed out, a too close relationship between Weston’s compositions and his sentimental biography is established; For MAH, it constitutes an error to emphasize its Don Juanism: it is true that in one of those nudes a sexual look is present, but in the majority its formalistic vocation is dominant, their attention to the performativity of the forms; Hence it is possible to establish comparisons between their bodies and their objects.
In 1937 he would become the first photographer to receive a Guggenheim scholarship and in 1941 he was commissioned one of his most original projects: to illustrate the poems of Walt Whitman Grass leaves; To that end, the United States toured, until the future of World War II prevented it, and moved away from the pictorialism of its beginnings. The year in which the conflict ended, the Moma in New York gave him a retrospective (which gathered, approximately, the same number of pieces as Mapfre); The disease would make it difficult for him to work from now on, but he could still present another anthology at the Musée D´Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, a city where he died.
Lifting, naked natures, landscapes and portraits that have arrived in Madrid are structured in seven sections, starting with their first impressionist views and pastoral themes, which he already granted blurred approaches and expressive poses that advanced avant -garde purposes.
It will not take too long, like other photographers that were contemporaries, in expanding their interests towards new issues: objects, motifs and figures that decontextualized to accentuate their capacity for suggestion, the possibility of transcendence that housed since their simplicity. It began to perceive, in the twenties, that in compositional simplicity and intuition could find paths to travel and, surely, that the act of gaze occurs with the whole body and with the mind, not just with the eyes. That’s why we don’t always look the same.
Grass leavesWhitman’s aforementioned work led him to dive on that path to look for the extraordinary in the banal. Interestingly, one of his images of that moment is dedicated to a Toilet (Duchamp’s was prior, but they are about a decade). In addition to influencing the many possibilities of two -dimensionality, the details were used as a means to fragment or generate depth, especially in their lifting nature.
As for his nudes, in which he worked mainly in Mexico, they differ from each other especially in their frames: they are sometimes wide and even show the face of their models; Others focuses on certain parts of the body to play with shapes. Lines, shadows and contours are put at the service of sensuality, but also of the mystery.
Another of his great reasons was the aforementioned landscape: they made them mainly in Palm Springs (California), and also in New Mexico, Arizona and California areas near his home in Carmel. His treatment of each other is based on the horizon and depth: the panoramic ones favored the sublime character of the images, in addition to the tormentous weather phenomena.
As he advanced in his career, he was acquiring his production a nostalgic tone, very evident in his creations for Whitman’s poems. Melancholy bathes its compositions dedicated to the cemeteries of Georgia and Louisiana, their visions of abandoned buildings … Stamps of disenchantment regarding that moment in American history.
And the exhibition closed his works taken in Point Lobos, in a cabin of his son he moved in 1938. His places seduced him by his rugged nature, which demanded a less rigid look. The naturalness in splendor are, finally, lonely and melancholic.
“Edward Weston. The subject of forms”
Mapfre Foundation
Recoletos Paseo, 23
Madrid
From September 19, 2025 to January 18, 2026
