Real American Places: Edward Weston Collaborates With Leaves of Grass

Hyperallergic's Allison Meier previews the Huntington's exhibition Real American Places: Edward Weston & Leaves of Grass, which opens this Saturday in San Marino, California. Although Edward Weston and Walt Whitman did not overlap during their lifetimes, Whitman's Leaves of Grass inspired Weston to further articulate and elaborate on the poetic tome's concepts, with a 1941 edition updated to include Weston's photographs of modern America. The Huntington's exhibition features 25 of Weston's photographs from the reprint, in addition to some of Whitman's manuscripts from the institution's archive. More:

Walt Whitman’s America is large, it contains multitudes. When Edward Weston set out to photograph the United States of the 1940s for a new edition of the 19th-century poet’s Leaves of Grass, he attempted to represent the manifold experiences of life in the country. Although Weston believed he did some of his best work on the cross-country road trip, the book was a failure. This was in part due to its bad design that printed his photographs on a seafoam green background, paired with Whitman quotes that gave his images an unintended illustrative perspective.

Real American Places: Edward Weston & Leaves of Grass, opening October 22 at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, reconsiders this dialogue between the two creators. As Whitman died in 1892, and Weston was born in 1886, there was naturally no in-person discussions. Rather, it’s an unexpected connection between Whitman’s free verse and Weston’s tightly controlled photographs.

“Both Weston and Whitman were thinking about groups of pictures, whether mental pictures conjured by reading poems or those of photographic prints,” James Glisson, Bradford and Christine Mishler assistant curator of American art at the Huntington, told Hyperallergic. “Both poet and photographer are in a manner of speaking filmmakers cutting from shot to shot, jumping from place to place. Whitman has his lists that roll on for pages, while Weston was thinking about the groups of photographs gathered in the photobooks he spent much of his later years publishing. The abrupt transitions as one reads lines or flips through a photobook’s pages are roughly equivalent.”

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