Edward Weston’s “Leaves of Grass” exhibit is currently on display at the Portland Museum of Art and will run through March 13. The exhibit features a collection of photos taken by Weston in 1941 to provide visual accompaniment to Walt Whitman’s seminal poetry collection Leaves of Grass. The result is a body of 53 photos, most of which are in the large 8×10 format. They arranged from west to east and are best viewed in sequence as suggested by the arrangement of the exhibition so that the viewer can follow Weston’s journey across the United States. Weston’s photos attempt to emphasize man’s impact on the American landscape by capturing images as subtle as tire tracks in desert sands or as glaring as a Texas oil refinery, while also representing untouched scenes such as a tree laden with snow in rural Tennessee.
Weston and his wife Charis started their journey in Southern California shooting first at Boulder Dam (later renamed Hoover Dam) and traveled through the Grand Canyon in Arizona. They stopped at the Yaqui Indian Church in Arizona before continuing on to White Sands and Las Truchas New Mexico where Weston captured textures of the sparse surrounding desert. The couple made their way through the vast stretches of Texas and into New Orleans where Weston became interested in cemeteries and plantation houses. A roadside restaurant in Mississippi was the next attraction before landing at the foot of an enormous steel factory in Ohio. Weston eventually reached the city of Cincinnati and began taking in rooftop views that became a miniseries within this larger body of work. These inner city views highlight towering smoke stacks that signal the booming industry of the early 1940s, while presenting a contrast to the rural scenes. A serene shot in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia was taken just after Weston learned of the Pearl Harbor bombing, an event that eventually sent the Westons back to California.
In New York Weston took photos in Brooklyn, Midtown Manhattan and Greenwich Village while on the East Coast. The exhibit mentions the Westons acquired a deep appreciation of California weather as it became increasingly difficult to photograph scenes in darker conditions inherent to the northeast region. It was for this reason that Weston took so few photographs in Maine. He had hoped to capture the essence of Maine’s rocky coast, only to be stymied by darkness and mist that forced him to settle for shots of a wedding cake house in Kennebunkport. The cold and dark northeast climate did however lend itself well to solemn gravestone shots in Deerfield, Mass. as seen in the multiple photos taken by Weston.
Along the way, Weston became worried about retaining copyright of his favorite images, so he sometimes shot slight variations of the same scene in an effort to keep photos for himself. One example is a stoic portrait of an older couple. This, the exhibit notes, symbolized Weston’s insistence on maintaining artistic integrity and control over his end of the project as Weston desired that his photos would not be in direct correlation to Whitman’s poem. At the trip’s end, the Westons had covered 20,000 miles through 24 states resulting in up to 800 negatives.
On a sign at the exhibit Weston has a quote about his work: “Anything that excites me, for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual.”
The Portland Museum of Art is located at 7 Congress Square and open from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday. Admission is free for all USM students.