Developing the Image: Poiesis and the Viewer in the photography of Edward Weston and the Painting of Alexi Worth

What role does the viewer play in developing a photographic image? What are we to do when faced with this strange medium that simultaneously mixes monumental immobility with the elusiveness of the ephemeral? A film unfurling before our eyes is persistently transformed through the activity of our projection: its multiple reframings and cuts insert us into its web and allow us to transitively dream ourselves into the movie. By contrast, the static image with its rigid frame seems implacable, muter than the objects it contains. Photography offers us no equivalent to cinephilia. Instead of love [philia], still images invite mania: showing (“here are my vacation photos”), forwarding, copying, hoarding (taking photo that are never to be seen, just saved in a file). The poiesis of the viewer’s response to photography seems fully displaced by the fetish quality of the object: we arrive to photographs too late, when they are already achieved. “The photograph,” writes Roland Barthes, is “close to the Haiku. For the notation of a haiku, too, is undevelopable: everything is given, without provoking the desire for or even the possibility of rhetorical expansion.” ¹

The work of Edward Weston provides an ideal testing ground for the hand the viewer might have in transforming the photograph, or how photography may evince the “possibility [for] rhetorical expansion” even as it maintains the compact brevity of Haiku. Weston is the quintessential modernist photographer, renowned for his attempt to master each step of the photographic process: choice of subjects, exposure time, the development of negatives and prints, the exhibition of his images, even their reception and interpretation, were all closely monitored by the artist. ² Weston exercised his artistic precision over what he found in the grocer’s aisle, transforming everyday edibles into majestic forms: Weston’s kale, peppers, onions, mushrooms, chard, and even his nudes, framed in such a way to make them seem part of the same food group, have become some of the most recognizable icons of the photographic landscape. His mastery exerted itself twofold: in creating vegetal images that break decisively with the pre-digested idiom of the still life, and in working against the accelerated mortality of these models that aged rapidly in the strong light of his photographic studio. In his Daybooks Weston notes, “Today I have the eggplants, though some withered, and an exquisite head of lettuce! Good luck to myself!” ³ The next day, however, he ruefully remarks, “The lettuce moved—wilted—during the prolonged exposure: the eggplant fruit group is perhaps too obviously arranged: but three long radishes have excited me quite as the shells did. I combined them into a finely-moving rhythm, into something that will live.” ⁴

Critics have traditionally assumed Weston’s perspective in approaching his work. This vantage point emphasizes that the creation of the photograph resides squarely in its production, and never in its reception. Hollis Frampton, for example, observes

A photographer as prolific as Weston enjoys a peculiar and appalling opportunity: that is, to reduplicate the world in a throng of likenesses and possess it entirely. It is true, of course, that one cannot photograph all cabbages, but one can photograph one and generate from the negative a potentially infinite supply of prints, happy in the certainty that one will never run out of cabbages. No levity, no mere question of connoisseurship, can be involved in the selection of the precise cabbage to be photographed. It must be undefiled, incorrupt; no verb may intrude to pollute, delete in the slightest from, the fulsome purity of the noun. Into the workshop of the photographer who would remanufacture the world, only one or the other of two verbs may come, and it is obliged to wipe its feet at the door: take or make. Take your choice. ⁵

Frampton elevates photography into a pure noun, an event frozen into an object. Yet in trying to pinpoint the verb by which we understand the production of photographic images, Frampton leaves the reader with both a choice and an imperative: “take...