Sandstone Erosion and Stump

From the Getty Museum record

> As early as 1929, after he moved to Carmel, Edward Weston began to transport his camera outdoors, approaching subjects such as rocks, tree trunks, wild mushrooms, and kelp with immense enthusiasm. He wrote, “I get greater joy from finding things in Nature, already composed, than I do from my finest personal arrangements.” Careful to avoid picturesque clichés of the Point Lobos coastline, he experimented with microcosmic bits of the natural environment in a similar fashion as he had with shells and other still-life subjects in the studio. The results sometimes bordered on abstraction. > > This image, which depicts a piece of sandstone set carefully against a gnarled stump, falls somewhere between Weston's impromptu outdoor studies and his studio arrangements. While he used the word erosion to describe the sandstone in the picture's title, the form is actually a concretion, typical of those from the Salton Sea in California's Imperial Valley, an area he would photograph the following year. Weston must have been particularly fond of this image, for he gave prints of it to his friends and fellow artists Ansel Adams (1902-1984), Sonya Noskowiak (1900-1975), and Henry Swift (1891-1960) and later selected it for inclusion in bodies of work being deposited in both the Huntington Library and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (see ). > > Adapted from Brett Abbott. *Edward Weston*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), 66. ©2005, J. Paul Getty Trust.