#FBF: Learn about the high-wire life of Xenia Kashevaroff Cage ’35, called “Sculptor of the Surreal, Whacker of Flowerpots” in this Reed Magazine piece by John Sheehy ’82. She was photographed by Edward Weston in 1931, and this portrait is now in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Labeled as “one of the most innovative and influential American photographers,” Weston was the first photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. Known for capturing countless subjects, such as landscape, nudes, portraits, still-lifes, Weston’s goal was “to make the commonplace unusual.” Although he emerged from the Victorian Era, his images portray an abstract modernism, which treads the realms of reality. For Weston the detail of a shell (Figure 2), onion (Figure 3) or pepper (Figure 4) "completely outside subject matter" was alluring. Making something ordinary extraordinary "takes one beyond the world we know in the conscious mind.“ Up-close, personal, and pictorial, Weston’s work is difficult to label. Although, he considered himself a realist, his vast imagination has lead him to be called the greatest American photographer.
Carl Sandburg, Glendale’s Monte Sano Bridge, March 1921 -by Edward Weston and Margrethe Mather
According to Mather scholar Beth Gates Warren, Mather and Weston entered into a photographic partnership in 1921, and approximately twelve doubly-signed images from this period, among them the present portrait of Sandburg, are extant. This was the only time Weston co-signed work with another photographer.
This photograph of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and biographer, Carl Sandburg, was taken in March 1921 on Glendale’s Monte Sano Bridge. Sandburg, who was married to Edward Steichen’s sister Lillian, was in California on a lecture circuit and to interview Charlie Chaplin for the Chicago Daily News. Weston and Mather made at least two photographs of Sandburg, one of which was included in their joint exhibition at the San Francisco Camera Club in July of that year.
Ref.: Beth Gates Warren, Margrethe Mather & Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration (Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2001) Beth Gates Warren, Artful Lives: Edward Weston, Margrethe Mather, and the Bohemians of Los Angeles (J. Paul Getty Trust, 2011)
photo and note from Sotheby’s Catalogue : 175 Masterworks To Celebrate 175 Years Of Photography: Property from Joy of Giving Something Foundation (Sotheby’s, 11-12 Dec. 2014)
