Sorties and Surfaces

Finest show of "documentary" photographs in many a season was the Walker Evans show last autumn at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. Last week in Chicago appeared a complement to it. Shown at the Katharine Kuh galleries were 100 new prints by the able California photographer, Edward Weston.

Walker Evans, 35, and Edward Weston, 52, were born in St. Louis and Highland Park, Ill., respectively, but Evans went east and Weston went west. Like most artists of his generation, Evans got as far east as Paris. He returned to photograph life on the eastern seaboard with solitary detachment, a refined eye and a sharp sense of history. Meanwhile, Weston was in business as a portrait photographer in Glendale, San Francisco and finally in Carmel, California. Among professionals his off-hour studies of dunes, shells and vegetables became noted for their miraculous clarity. In 1936 he won the first Guggenheim fellowship ever given a photographer.

Freed by his fellowship, leathery Edward Weston has covered 25,000 miles of California and New Mexico on sorties lasting two and three weeks from bases in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Sick of human faces, he found his subjects in the surfaces of mountains and deserts. As Walker Evans' work fixes moments of a changing society, Weston's mirrors static Nature: the bleached bowl of Death Valley, with two black wheel tracks winding into it; elephant-textured granite in the Mojave Desert.

Weston's passionately perfected technique for getting sharp definition in distant as well as foreground objects once inspired the "F.64" Group--a club of California photographers sworn to experiment with that tiniest aperture of the diaphragm. For exacting selfdiscipline, Weston is still unique. He never takes duplicate negatives, never "crops" or trims a print to improve his composition.

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