INDIANAPOLIS, IND.- The son of a famed photographer, Brett Weston (1911–1993) was born into the world of American Modernism. Apprenticed early at his father’s side, he quickly developed his own individual style and rose to prominence as part of a generation of Modernist photographers who explored abstraction in the middle of the 20th century.
In 2015, the Indianapolis Museum of Art acquired its first 11 photographs by Weston, thanks to the generosity of the Christian Keesee Collection. These will be on view as part of Natural Abstraction: Brett Weston and His Contemporaries, opening in the Susan and Charles Golden Gallery on Floor 2 of the Museum. Weston’s works will be featured alongside those by eight of his colleagues, ranging from Ansel Adams to Aaron Siskind, allowing guests to explore the different ways each transformed subjects found outdoors into powerful compositional elements.

Dubbed the “child genius of American photography,” Brett Weston began working alongside his father, Edward, in Mexico at age 13. It was there that he was introduced to the great Modernist painters Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and Frida Kahlo, who influenced his nascent style. It was Weston’s inclusion, though, in the German avant-garde exhibition Film und Foto at age 17 that garnered him international recognition and launched his career. His rise as an artist occurred when photography was becoming increasingly accepted on the art market, creating a new period of success and influence both for him and his generation of creative photographers. A notable characteristic of these photographers’ work is the way that it moved toward abstraction by increasingly focusing on the tones, shapes, and lines of its subject matter, whose identity often became secondary in importance.

The abstraction in these photographs connected their creators to wider trends in the art world. While abstract painters could create their own gestural marks and shapes on a canvas, these photographers sought out shapes and patterns as they already existed in the world and played them up in their final images.

Even though certain formal and compositional interests were clearly shared by the artists in this exhibition, they never formed a unified group that moved in lockstep toward abstraction. Each had his or her own approach and mindset. Edward and Brett Weston often worked together, and their photographs reveal how each influenced the other’s style. Brett was good friends with the popular landscape photographer Ansel Adams (1902–1984), but his style was vastly different from Adams’s more representational and systematized approach. Adams’s sharp images and love of nature similarly inspired a number of other featured artists, such as Harry Callahan (1912–1999). However, Callahan developed his own personal style that Adams found disagreeably removed from a sense of place.

Despite their differences, all of these artists were united in their mastery of the craft of gelatin silver photography. The process of making a beautiful photographic print is not only highly creative, but also highly technical, and photographers relied on a firm understanding of chemistry and optics as the only way to realize their artistic vision. How a silver gelatin print is created is briefly outlined in the exhibition, with particular attention drawn to the multitude of times that a photographer must make technical decisions that affect the appearance of a work—from selecting an aperture size in the field to developing the final print in the darkroom. These processes, uncommon today, were extremely important to Weston and his contemporaries. He felt strongly that the final steps of printing from a negative were part of his artistic practice. So greatly did Weston fear that others would use his negatives after his death, that he made plans to destroy all of them in a bonfire on his 80th birthday. In the end, he preserved a handful for archival purposes, burned a symbolic few, and destroyed the remaining thousands with a garden hose rather than in a toxic inferno.

Although the technical methods of a midcentury black-and-white photographer are very different from those employed by most creative photographers today, the inspiration that Weston and his contemporaries found existing naturally in the world around them can be shared by any photographer. As Weston said of his process, “My eye is always wandering and seeking.” The spirit of his photography can be shared by all who wander and seek inspiration on the Newfields campus. Guests are invited to compare the works here with those in other current or upcoming photography exhibitions, including Inspired by Spring, open now inside Lilly House, Portraits of Our City, and Sensual/Sexual/Social: The Photography of George Platt Lynes, opening on September 30.