Getty Museum

Armco Steel

Date

1922

Medium

Palladium print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

In the fall of 1922 Edward Weston traveled to visit his sister, May (1877-1952), who had moved from California lo Middletown, Ohio. Earlier that year he had proclaimed his “conversion” to Modernism in a lecture he gave in Los Angeles and advised making pictures without manipulation and “of the tremendous industries of our day—pictures drawn from out the whirl of our seething maelstrom of commercialism.” His trip to Ohio provided the opportunity to practice what he had preached, and he wrote in his daybook of the trip, “The Middletown visit was something to remember. . . . But most of all in importance was my photographing of 'Armco', the great plant and giant stacks of the American Rolling Mill Co. That day I made great photographs.” Having firmly rejected Pictorial tenets, Weston was primed to visit New York City and meet Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), the legendary promoter of straight photography and Modernism in America. Weston's sister and brother-in-law provided the money to make the trip from Ohio to New York possible, and he set off for the city armed with some of his favorite prints, the new Armco series among them. He was successful in his bid to meet Stieglitz, who critiqued his work, both rejecting and praising pictures. Stieglitz also showed Weston some of his own latest photographs as well as still-life paintings by his wife, Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986). Their work, in addition to that which he saw by Charles Sheeler (1883-1965), Paul Strand (1890-1976), Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), inspired resolution in Weston's newfound direction. Brett Abbott. Edward Weston, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), 26. ©2005, J. Paul Getty Trust.

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