WESTON NUDES REVISITED
Edward Weston is one of the great photographers of the 20th century. A few weeks ago I learned that January 1, 2008 is the 50th anniversary of Weston's death, so I decided to do an homage to some of his classic nude work. On October 30, I sent a message to Lela Rae and asked if she was interested in working with me on the Weston project. One week later we were on our way to the sand dunes of western Michigan (other photos from that trip are in her gallery). The sand was wet, cold, and packed from recent snow and rain so we couldn't get the cascading sand effect in Weston's images. The temperature was 37 degrees and a cold wind was blowing across the dunes from Lake Michigan, but we went ahead with our project. We emulated some of Weston's classic poses and followed up with some poses of our own. The cold, wet sand turned Lela's skin pink but I chose not to digitally remove the evidence of the cold. We did the rest of the project in December in my studio. The black and white images (except for one) are by Edward Weston, followed by our images. While it was an interesting and informative exercise to emulate Weston's images, it was more satisfying to create our own.