Getty Museum

[Bedpan]

Date

1930

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

Object ID

90814150-bb10-48c7-9b4b-5944b0f56a67

> In January 1950 Edward Weston was photographing bones in his studio when a bedpan caught his attention. Propping it up on end, he made what he called an “exquisite negative,” in which the luminous white bowl is set off-center against a deep black ground that is articulated only faintly on the edges by a box supporting the bedpan. He had previously photographed a ceramic toilet in Mexico, but this composition was almost surely inspired by another, more-recent experience. Just a few days before Weston made the picture, he had visited the home of Walter Arensberg (1878-1954) and his wife, Louise Arensberg (1879-1953), who maintained an important collection of modern art, including work by Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Henri Matisse (1869-1954), Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), and Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), whose smooth and vertically oriented abstract sculptures made an impression on him. He commented that Bedpan might easily be called “The Princess” or “The Bird,” referring to the Brancusi sculptures he had seen at the Arensberg residence. > > As in his other still lifes, Weston's dramatic, full-frame composition encourages the viewer to see this rather mundane object anew. The heightened depiction suggests an inherent beauty in the bedpan's form while simultaneously demonstrating that it is the artist's presentation more than the subject itself that is pleasing. Weston wrote, “I want the *greater mystery of things revealed more clearly than the eyes see*, at least more than the layman. . . . Anything that excites me, for any reason, I will photograph: not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual.” > > Brett Abbott. *Edward Weston*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), 60. ©2005, J. Paul Getty Trust.

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