Getty Museum

Armco

Date

September 1941

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

Object ID

9a3e3017-f970-4193-9cc6-6dc9778aea8a

> George Macy, director of the Limited Editions Club, invited Edward Weston in 1941 to illustrate a new edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Weston accepted the offer, which paid fifteen hundred dollars in combined salary and travel expenses in exchange for a minimum of fifty-four photographs. His goal, however, was not to illustrate so much as to provide his own contemporary vision of America to complement and parallel Whitman's. As they had done on the Guggenheim travels, Weston and his second wife, Charis Wilson (1914-2009), purchased a car and drove off to photograph the countryside, this time heading beyond the West through at least twenty states, traveling some twenty thousand miles. He left on a decidedly upbeat note, writing in a letter to his friends, photo historians Beaumont (1908-1993) and Nancy Newhall (1908-1974), "I can and will do the best work of my life.” > > Weston was not nearly so enthusiastic about the *Leaves of Grass* edition that resulted. The forty-nine pictures selected for the publication were paired with specific lines from the poems, making the images more literally illustrative and less apparent as autonomous works of art than he had envisioned. This plate was reproduced over the following lines from "A Song for Occupations": "The blast-furnace and the puddling­furnace, / The loup-lump at the bottom of the melt at last." Nor was he pleased with the reproduction of his photographs on green tinted paper, which he found distasteful. Summarizing his feelings in a letter to the photo collector and book publisher Merle Armitage (1893-1975), Weston wrote, "My reaction to W. W. Book is quite definite: it stinks.” > > Adapted from Brett Abbott. *Edward Weston*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), 82. ©2005, J. Paul Getty Trust.

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