Aspen Valley

Edward Weston

1937

Edward Weston created sharply focused black-and-white photographs of nature using a large-format camera.  To capture detail equally in the tangle of tree branches and landscape of Aspen Valley, Weston also used the smallest aperture–or variable opening through which light passes–on his camera.  Beginning in the early 1930s, Weston exhibited as part of Group f/64, a photography collective named after this aperture setting.  Together these photographers pioneered and promoted a new modernist style of photography that sought to capture the minute details and essential qualities of their West Coast subject matter.

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In his catalogue raisonné of Inness's work, Michael Quick describes the painting, writing, "On the right are two dismasted battleships, both aflame, the nearer one silhouetted by the brighter, explosive glow from the one behind it. In the rolling waves at the left, men escape in three rowboats. The conflagration lights up the foreground waves and the clouded night sky."
Female nude figure with vase with partial figure. Drawn on both sides. A head is on verso.
White Mountains (Winter Scene), Benjamin Champney, oil on board
This black and white photograph shows a view looking down at grasses. Some are straight but most are curled, and the grasses extend from the left to the right side of the composition and from the top to the bottom of the composition.