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Description: BANANAS

measurements note
9 5/8 by 7 5/8 in. (24.5 by 19.4 cm.)

mounted, signed, dated, and numbered '10/50' by the photographer in pencil on the mount, dated and numbered '1F' by him in pencil on the reverse, matted, 1930, no. 10 in a projected edition of 50

PROVENANCE

The photographer to Sonya Noskowiak

By descent to Mrs. Jadwiga Noskowiak Babcock, Sonia Noskowiak's sister, Carmel, California

Mark Kelman, New York

Acquired by the Gilman Paper Company from the above, 1979

LITERATURE

Another print of this image:

Conger 597

Karen Sinsheimer et al., An Eclectic Focus: Photographs from the Vernon Collection (Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1999, in conjunction with the exhibition), p. 83.

NOTE

The photograph offered here is from a series of ten negatives Weston made of bananas in June of 1930. Weston's first banana pictures had been made in the spring of 1927, the year Weston began his transforming photographs of shells and vegetables. 'I was awake at 4,' Weston wrote in his journal in April 1927, 'with my mind full of banana forms! I have two new loves--bananas and shells.' In his mind, Weston originally envisioned a vertical composition, one with 'the columns of bananas filling the entire plate, curved at the top to a common focus' (Daybooks, California, 4 -- 10 April 1927, pp. 13-14). The bananas he had planned to use, however, were eaten by his sons, and three years would pass before he undertook a vertical composition again.

In June of 1930, Weston appears to have discovered the perfect bunch of bananas that would carry out his early plans. On June 19^th, he wrote of that day's trip to the grocery store, where he found fruits and vegetables that would keep him 'going for days to come: bananas,--not new to my work; I had done two negatives in 1927, and then was sidetracked. But how much better I can do them now! And what exciting curves, forms, this bunch had. I know from my thrill upon seeing them that something important is coming.'

On June 26^th, regarding what is almost certainly the image offered here, he recorded:

'The new banana negative is great! A bunch of 5 standing on end, still joined at the top,---and how beautiful the fruit is at the point of radiation from the main stalk,--the concave side to the camera. The three centre bananas are perfectly straight, the two outer ones swell out from the top, then almost straighten to cut diagonally across all but the centre fruit. It is a classic composition and I am proud to have made it.'

And then, describing precisely what enabled these bananas to stand so beautifully on end, he adds, 'I should have said that the front row of the bunch of five, for in the back several more are hidden . . .' (Daybooks, California, pp. 169 -171).

The present bananas image was included in Weston's important 1930 one-man exhibition at the Delphic Studios gallery in New York. In his negative log, now preserved at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Weston notes that of the projected edition of 50, he made only 10 prints from the negative (1F). The print offered here, number 10 in the edition, belonged originally to Sonya Noskowiak (1900--1975), a young German-born woman who met Weston in 1929, became his darkroom assistant, and then, as with so many of Weston's female friends and acquaintances, his lover. A talented photographer herself, Noskowiak was one of the founding members of the Group f.64. Her romance with Weston ended in 1935, when he became involved with Charis Wilson, later his second wife. The bananas image was not the only Weston photograph Noskowiak acquired during their six-year relationship: the Noskowiak Collection in the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson includes 58 original Weston prints.

Another print of the bananas study offered here is in the Vernon Collection (number 9/50), Los Angeles, California. In 2004, number 7/50 appeared at auction in New York (Christie's, 27 April 2004, Sale 1367, Lot 303).