Getty Museum

Nude, Flora Chandler Weston (86.XM.719.13)

Date

negative 1909; print 1910

Medium

Platinum print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

> When Edward Weston and Flora Chandler (1879-1965) married in January 1909, he was employed at the portrait studio of A. Louis Mojonier (1869-1944), located in downtown Los Angeles (see examples of Mojonier’s studio portraiture: [86.XA.717.165](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/65988/a-louis-mojonier-portrait-of-a-man-wearing-a-pin-and-tie-american-nd/), [86.XA.717.168](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/65991/a-louis-mojonier-woman-in-oriental-costume-looking-around-oriental-screen-american-nd/), [86.XA.717.169](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/65992/a-louis-mojonier-woman-in-oriental-costume-american-nd/), [86.XA.717.172](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/65995/a-louis-mojonier-man-and-woman-in-costume-wearing-feathered-hats-american-nd/), [86.XA.717.173](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/65996/a-louis-mojonier-nine-girls-in-scottish-attire-american-nd/), [86.XA.717.192](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/66015/a-louis-mojonier-profile-portrait-of-a-woman-wearing-a-straw-hat-with-feathers-american-nd/)). Weston's work hours were likely spent spotting negatives and occasionally operating the camera to make standard portraits, but he pursued more personal work in photography during his free time. Here Flora was the model for a nude study in the Pictorial mode. Seated in a grassy field, she reaches her right hand up toward the low-lying branches of a nearby tree while balancing her weight with her left arm outstretched and right thigh raised. Capturing Flora in this simultaneously graceful and tenuous position, Weston sets her figure apart from the dreamy, soft-focus atmosphere and lends the photograph a subtle dynamism. > > The image of a nude female figure in an idyllic natural setting reaching up as though to pick fruit recalls the biblical story of Eve. Though such literary allusions are not found in Weston's later work, they were a staple of the Pictorialist style. He may have had in mind the work of Anne Brigman (1869-1950), a California Pictorial photographer whose romantic depictions of the nude figure reveling in nature were published in Camera Work the year he and Flora married. Whatever the inspiration may have been, this image represents one of Weston's earliest explorations of the nude, a subject to which he would be drawn repeatedly throughout his career. > > Flora, who was pregnant at the time this photograph was made, gave birth to the couple's first son, Edward Chandler Weston, on April 26, 1910 (d. 1995). The following year, Weston left Mojonier's studio to open his own business as a portrait photographer. Asked by his sister, May, why he chose the small suburb of Tropico for this first independent foray, Weston replied, “Sis, I'm going to make my name so famous that it won’t matter where I live.” > > Brett Abbott. *Edward Weston*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), 14. ©2005, J. Paul Getty Trust.

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