Estimated Price:

   £   

Realised Price:

   £   

What is this symbol? This symbol indicates that this auction hose has verified this price result.

Log in or subscribe to view price data

'SCENE SHIFTER'

measurements note
9 1/2 by 7 5/8 in. (24.2 by 19.5 cm.)

platinum print, with gouache highlights, signed by the photographer in pencil on the reverse, tipped to a large tan mount, signed, dated, and titled (erased) by the photographer in pencil on the mount, matted, 1921

PROVENANCE

Weston Gallery, Carmel, California

Acquired by the Gilman Paper Company from the above, 1979

LITERATURE

Other prints of this image:

Conger 56

Beaumont Newhall, Supreme Instants: The Photographs of Edward Weston (Center for Creative Photography, 1986, in conjunction with the exhibition), cat. 11

NOTE

This enigmatic and little-known Edward Weston photograph may have as its model one of the photographer's friends or acquaintances from the theatrical circles frequented by Weston and Margrethe Mather in Los Angeles's early Hollywood days. Or, as with other Weston pictorialist studies, the title may have little to do with the ostensible subject, but rather is applied to a posed tableau in the photographer's Glendale studio. Conger 56 points out that the 'Scene Shifter' relates to a study of Betty Brandner moving stage flats, a picture now in the collection of The J. Paul Getty Museum (reproduced in Weston Naef and Susan Danley's Edward Weston in Los Angeles, San Marino, 1986, pl. 3).

Whatever its basis in fact, the photograph remains a striking study in tone and shadow. The deep shadows are offset by the gouache highlights on the model's shirt; the intersecting angles of the shadows, the ladder, and the bending model give the whole a kinetic energy. As with the Mather Pierrot study in Lot 18, the 'Scene Shifter' belongs to a whole group of photographs by Mather, Weston, and their contemporaries in which shadows play a major compositional role. Arthur F. Kales, another California pictorialist who created even more exaggerated shadows in his pictures, frequently used actual movie sets as backdrops, with costumed dancers and actresses as his models. One suspects that despite its theatrical title, the Weston study offered here has more to do with form than with the theatre. Conger posits that this may be 'the first surviving abstract composition by Weston.'

The 'Scene Shifter' was one of six photographs Weston sent to the important 1921 Pittsburgh Salon, and remnants of a paper label on the mount's reverse might indicate that the print offered here is the actual print used in that exhibition. Of Weston's 1921 Pittsburgh pictures, the most remembered today is from Weston's 'attic series,' Ramiel in His Attic, which one reviewer termed 'suggestive of cubist thought' (American Photography, Volume XV, No. 5, May 1921, p. 226). Although the attic pictures have taken a lead role in current assessment of the photographer's oeuvre, the angles and shadows shared by these attic pictures and the 'Scene Shifter' demonstrate variant ways of Weston working on the same themes and compositional problems.

At the time of this writing, only one other print of the image offered here has been located, a palladium print in the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson.