Brett Weston photos at Santa Barbara Museum

I've been waiting 30 years for a retrospective of the work of Brett Weston (1911-1993), the second of Edward Weston's four sons and, in my opinion, not only a better photographer than his famous father but perhaps the greatest American photographer ever. Of course, such judgments are always a matter of taste, and I admit to being partial towards the sensibility Brett Weston's art reveals: sharply delineated, quasi-abstract work in black and white that interrogates (and renders permeable) the boundaries between form and image.

The elder Weston was a formalist, too, as was Brett's better-known younger brother, Cole, who worked primarily in color. But Edward, seeing his son's first, astonishingly mature prints, remarked that his son was a better photographer at 14 than he had been at 30. It was not paternal modesty. Brett Weston had his own eye from the moment he stepped behind a camera, and he both composed and deconstructed the world—a simultaneous process for him—as no one else did.

Naturally, Weston learned a good deal from his father, as well as from his modernist contemporaries. Photography, in those days, was an almost monastic discipline: solitary work in frequently inhospitable places, for the most part poorly paid unless one took on commercial assignments.

Photography: The heroic calling

Part of the rigor and strength of modernist photography comes precisely from the sense it still exudes as a holy calling— a new form that embraced, as nothing else could do, both nature and technology in the act of art-making. There had been heroic precursors, but the modernists might properly feel that at last the technical aspects of picture taking were fully equal to the demands of artistic vision— indeed, that they might develop together.

There's not a single image among the 146 silver gelatin prints that comprise the exhibition of "Brett Weston: Out of the Shadow" at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art that doesn't bespeak a singular vision, and many are revelatory as only great art can be. Weston doesn't pose objects; he takes the world as he finds it, pondering whatever it presents to the naked eye until the distinctive form emerges that can define it. This form is rarely fixed; rather, it is its essential fluidity and interpenetrability that is again and again suggested, and with it the underlying unity of the world amid the welter of its phenomena.

Dry earth as a complex achievement

A particularly striking example is Mud Cracks (1970), in which the unretouched image of its humble subject startlingly suggests the aerial view of a city crisscrossed by black canals. The notion that dry earth in its humblest form—not even the bricks of which some African cities are even today composed—could signify the most complex achievement of human civilization is a deep vision of the substratum on which the world's variety rests.

Similarly, Ferns, Hawaii (c. 1980) puts one in mind of the chevrons of New York's Chrysler Building, while Building Reflections (1981) recalls the tropical ferns.

Purity of vision… and doubt

As you might expect, Weston frequently exploits the possibility of reflection, whether in windows or lakes. In Pond, High Sierra (1971), the refracted rocks suggest floating coffins, while in Mendenhall Glacier, Alaska, blocks of ice in the frigid waters appear as strange, lunar fish. What's alive, and what's not? What's made and what's natural? Everything in Weston possesses the most crystalline clarity, yet at the same time a transparency that estranges at the very moment of revelation, as if the most intense purity of vision could only exist with the highest degree of doubt.

If this sounds like a Platonic quest, I think it is. Time and again in Weston's work, one comes up against forms so pure and compelling that one says, Yes, that is how it is, only to find them shape-shifting, as if instability is their essence.

Far from disappointing us, however, the protean qualities suggested by Weston's camera are vivifying and enriching. Purity is a trap, too; and multiplicity is its exit.

In any case, I can't think of another photographer who could make one image of a cactus look like a great star-burst with a black hole at its center, and another like a composite nude with exfoliating breasts.

Humanity and geometry

Early in Weston's career, the geometrical exactitude of industrial designs fascinated him as it did many other modernists, although there is always something a little off-kilter and subversive in his images of tubing and machinery, as if to blunt a certain arrogance and sterility. Geometry is, after all, an abstraction of form, and if it exerts a powerful attraction on the mind, it needs as Weston suggests to be countered by the wayward asymmetry and unpredictability of the organic world. Thus, to set Clay Pipes (1927) against the bulbous, penile forms of Kelp (1954) is to show how these images correct and comment on each other.

The human race introduced geometry into its earliest habitats; it has discovered chaos only within the past couple of generations. The cosmos, Brett Weston suggests, needs both.

My favorite

Perhaps for this reason the Weston photograph that's always spoken to me most directly is Garrapata Beach, California (1954), a magnificent composition that uses sharply-cut boulders and shadows against a soft crown of more gently eroded hills to suggest a natural geometry almost on the brink of intention and design, the dream of a city before cities could be.

I know that beach; it is, for me, one of the most exhilarating places on earth. Yet what Weston's genius found in it— an unmeditated intersection between the human and the natural, as if in a divine musing of what man and the world could ask and find in each other—is (to use again a word for which I can find no synonym) a revelation.

A great artist is also a great thinker, and there is more to ponder here about our place and fate in the world we are so ceaselessly and heedlessly transforming than in many a learned tome. It's a lot more fun to look at, too.