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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
That there is a striking correspondence between the thinking of such A nineteenth-century transcendentalists as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and that of the twentieth-century American master of photography Edward Weston should come as no great surprise, for it is widely recognized that transcendentalism has been an essential ingredient in the lives and work of numerous major American artists. During the nineteenth century, this influence was most fully expressed by poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, by the painter Thomas Eakins, and by the architect Louis Sullivan. At the turn of the century, the composer Charles Ives and painters Robert Henri and his “Ashcan” colleagues John Sloan, George Luks, William Glackens, and Everett Shinn continued to draw sustenance from the ideas and example of the transcendentalists. And during the early twentieth century, the brilliant architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the gifted painter Georgia O'Keeffe, and major poets Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams made clear through their work the looming presence of the transcendentalist tradition. Thus, well before the 1920s, when Edward Weston began making his most innovative photographs, transcendentalism consciously and unconsciously pervaded American intellectual and artistic life: It was something to absorb or reject-or both. “Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith, the army of unalterable law,” was how Eliot put it. Weston was not exempt from this law.
1. Eliot, T. S., Complete Poems (New York: Harcourt, 1952), p. 18.Google Scholar See Bloom, Harold, Figures of Capable Imagination (New York: Seabury Press, 1976)Google Scholar, chs. 3 and 7; Miller, Perry, “From Edwards to Emerson,” in Errand into the Wilderness (1956; rpt. New York: Harper-Torchbook, 1964), p. 202Google Scholar; Ives, Charles, Essays Before a Sonata, the Majority, and Other Writings, ed. Boatwright, Howard (New York: Norton, 1970)Google Scholar; Hunter, Sam, American Art of the Twenteith Century (New York: Harry N. Abrams, n.d.), pp. 20 ffGoogle Scholar; Rose, Barbara, American Art Since 1900, rev. ed. (New York: Praeger, 1975)Google Scholar, ch. 1; Rose, Barbara, “O'Keeffe's Trial,” New York Review 31 (03 1977): 29–33Google Scholar; Vickery, Robert, “The Transcendental Dream, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Suburbia,” Architectural Design 48 (1978): 512–15Google Scholar; Kenner, Hugh, The Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 105, 145 ff, 156–57, 231Google Scholar; Porte, Joel, Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 5Google Scholar; Poirier, Richard, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 186–88Google Scholar; and Bloom, Harold, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976).Google Scholar
2. Walden and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, ed. Pearson, Norman Holmes (San Francisco: Rinehart, 1948), pp. 164, 167.Google Scholar
3. The Daybooks of Edward Weston, California, ed. Newhall, Nancy (New York: Horizon, and Rochester, N.Y.: George Eastman House, 1966), vol. 2, p. 222.Google Scholar
4. Weston, , Daybooks, vol. 2, p. 53.Google Scholar
5. Thoreau, , Walden, p. 10.Google Scholar
6. Ibid., p. 215.
7. “Introduction,” in Weston, , Daybooks, vol. 1, p. xiii.Google Scholar Biographical information on Weston comes from the Daybooks, vols. 1 and 2, and from Maddow, Ben, Edward Weston, Fifty Years (Millerton: Aperture, 1973)Google Scholar, unless otherwise noted. At this time, it should be said that I will be arguing only that there existed a generic, as opposed to a genetic, connection between the transcendentalists and Weston. Perry Miller uses a similar argument in “From Edwards to Emerson” (pp. 184–03)Google Scholar, providing an excellent model. I agree with Miller that “certain basic continuities persist in a culture” (pp. 184–85)Google Scholar, and that these are absorbed both consciously and unconsciously by members of that culture.
8. See Hart, James D., The Popular Book (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963), pp. 136, 174.Google Scholar References to the Dial and Little Review appear in Daybooks, vol. 1, passim.
9. Rose, , “O'Keeffe's Trial,” p. 31.Google Scholar Stieglitz, Strand, and Weston, for instance, all shifted from the use of soft-focus photography to that of sharp-focus, Weston changing his style somewhat later than the others. O'Keeffe, Strand, and Weston also shared an interest in creating extreme close-up imagery. Fenollosa was also a very important link between Emerson and Pound (see Kenner, , Pound Era, pp. 105–6, 230–31).Google Scholar
10. See Nash, Roderick, Nature and the American Mind, 3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982)Google Scholar, ch. 8. See also Cawelti, John, Apostles of the Self-Made Man: Changing Concepts of Success in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954) pp. 77–98Google Scholar, for a discussion of Emersonianism and its vulgarization in the emerging American popular culture. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Davis, David Brion asserts, “came closer than anyone else to being America's official philosopher of the nineteenth century,”Google Scholar and his “worship of power and of self improvement [arguably] provided the Spiritual backdrop for the entire progressive era of the early twentieth-century.” Emerson also “denned the mission of native artists and writers” (Bernard Bailyn, David Brion Davis, Donald, David Herbert, Thomas, John L., Wiebe, Robert H., and Wood, Gordon S., The Great Republic: A History of the American People, 2nd ed. [Lexington, Mass., and Toronto: D. C. Heath and Company, 1981]), pp. 378–79.Google Scholar
11. Emerson, , “Nature,” in Gilman, William H., ed., Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: New American Library, 1965), p. 193.Google Scholar
12. Weston's images are by now well known. Numerous such examples are reproduced in Maddow, , Edward WestonGoogle Scholar; Weston, , Daybooks, vols. 1 and 2Google Scholar; and Newhall, Nancy, ed., Edward Weston: The Flame of Recognition (Millerton: Aperture, and New York: Grossman, 1971).Google Scholar
13. Emerson, , “Nature,” p. 189.Google Scholar See Porte, , Representative Man, pp. viii ff.Google Scholar, for an interesting discussion of Emersonian “seeing.”
14. Emerson, , “Nature,” p. 192.Google Scholar Use of the term painting in no way negates the photographic aspect. In the nineteenth century, photography was often called “sun-painting.” See, for example, Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Sun-Painting and Sun-Sculpture,” Atlantic Monthly 8 (1861): 13–29.
15. Emerson, , Nature, Addresses and Lectures (1876; rpt. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1903), p. 214.Google Scholar
16. Emerson, , “Nature,” pp. 192, 194, 196.Google Scholar
17. Ibid., p. 196.
18. Ibid., p. 189.
19. In Figures of Capable Imagination, p. 50Google Scholar, Bloom puts it this way: “Though Emerson centers on his eyes, he sees nothing, but inherits beauty and power.”
20. Emerson, , “Nature,” p. 191.Google Scholar
21. Ibid., p. 187. See Miller, , “From Edwards to Emerson,” pp. 185 ff.Google Scholar for an excellent summary of Emerson's concept of the Oversoul.
22. Weston, , Daybooks, vol. 2, p. 114.Google Scholar
23. Ibid., p. 221.
24. Ibid., pp. 222, 154.
25. Rudisill, Richard, Mirror Image: The Influence of the Daguerreotype on American Society (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971), pp. 54–55.Google Scholar The idea for this essay came from Rudisill's study, though I draw different conclusions about Weston's Emersonianism.
26. Weston, , Daybooks, vol. 2, p. 155.Google Scholar
27. Daybooks, vol. 1, p. 118.Google Scholar
28. Daybooks, vol. 2, p. 246.Google Scholar
29. “The American Scholar,” in Baritz, Loren, ed., Sources of the American Mind (New York and London: John Wiley and Sons, 1966), vol. 1, p. 331.Google Scholar
30. Weston, , Daybooks, vol. 2, p. 111.Google Scholar
31. Weston, Edward, “Seeing Photographically,” in Lyons, Nathan, ed., Photographers on Photography (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966), pp. 162–63.Google Scholar
32. Weston, Edward, “What Is Photographic Beauty?” in Photographers on Photography, p. 154.Google Scholar
33. Weston, , Daybooks, vol. 2, p. 154.Google Scholar
34. Daybooks, vol. 1, p. 191.Google Scholar
35. Daybooks, vol. 2, p. 181.Google Scholar
36. Weston, , “What Is Photographic Beauty?” p. 154.Google Scholar
37. Emerson, , “Nature,” p. 196.Google Scholar
38. Ibid., p. 187.
39. Ibid., p. 193.
40. “March 23, 1856,” in The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. Torrey, Bradford and Allen, Francis H. (1906; rpt. New York: Dover, 1962), vol. 2, p. 985.Google Scholar Despite Emerson's exhortations to experience nature firsthand, he seldom refers to senses other than sight; Thoreau does better in this regard-citing sound, for example.
41. For a thoughtful discussion of the theory of correspondence in Emerson's writings, see Meese, Elizabeth A., “Transcendentalism: The Metaphysics of a Theme,” American Literature 47 (1975): 1–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar There is a departure on Emerson's part from his own Puritan roots: The Puritans were foremost a people of the “word,” relying on language to explain and interpret spiritual and social-moral matters (see Miller, , “From Edwards to Emerson,” pp. 190 ff.Google Scholar and Bercovitch, Sacvan, The American Jeremiad [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978], passim).Google Scholar
42. Emerson, , “The Method of Nature,” p. 199.Google Scholar Note that Emerson's observation about Nature—the world-as a “rushing stream” anticipates by some fifty years William James's famous metaphor of experience as a flowing stream into which we dip our buckets. Also it might be well to recall that Emerson once delivered an entire lecture on “Experience” (in Selected Writings, pp. 327–48).Google Scholar Emerson and Thoreau were quite unlike their contemporary Sylvester Judd, who believed that “Nature, like art, seems to require a border to [it] in order to be finished” (quoted in Douglas, Ann, The Feminization of American Culture [1977; rpt. New York: Avon, 1978], p. 154).Google Scholar However, the two transcendentalists might well have agreed ironically that a border, indeed, would “finish” Nature.
43. Emerson, , “The Method of Nature,” p. 197.Google Scholar Emerson was, of course, not unaware that nature contained formal beauty, nor did he disapprove of this: “The primary forms, as the sky, the mountains, the tree, the animal, give us delight in and for themselves; a pleasure arising from outline, color, motion, and grouping” (“Nature,” p. 192).Google Scholar Still, form had its place in the scheme of things.
44. The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841–44, ed. Emerson, Edward Waldo and Forbes, Waldo Emerson (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1912), vol. 6, p. 101.Google Scholar In his 1884 essay “The Poet,” Emerson comments on the responsibility of the poet to control machines (in Selected Writings, p. 315).Google Scholar See Kasson, John F., Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776–1900 (1976; rpt. of Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977)Google Scholar, ch. 3, for an extensive discussion of Emerson and technology.
45. Weston, , Daybooks, vol. 2, p. 181.Google Scholar
46. Ibid., p. 57.
47. Ibid., p. 17.
48. Ibid., pp. 194, 240. For other references to form, see ibid., pp. 43, 140, 151, 234, 242. Especially interesting is Weston's 1930 comment about his first look at the work of Brancusi and others: “At a concert… I met… Walter Arensberg. Later to his home, where I saw the most concentrated collection of fine art that has ever been my privilege. Four Brancusis, four Rousseaus, four Cézannes,– Picasso, Matisse, Derain, Renoir, African sculpture, early American paintings– my surprise and admiration” (Ibid., p. 140).
49. When Weston did photograph large expanses (extreme long shots, in film parlance, or panoramic shots), he still composed in a manner that accentuated the formal qualities of the scene itself—the objects and their relationships to each other within the image's frame (see Figure 12).
50. “Art,” in Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Essays (1865; rpt. Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Concord, 1883), vol. 2, p. 358Google Scholar; Weston, , Daybooks, vol. 2, p. 25.Google Scholar Emerson's rejection of mediating agents is, according to Perry Miller, also derived from Puritanism. Miller puts it this way: “What is persistent, from the convenant theology (and from the heretics against the covenant) to Edwards and to Emerson is the Puritan's effort to confront, face to face, the image of a blinding divinity in the physical universe, and to look upon that universe without the intermediacy of ritual, of ceremony, of the Mass and the confessional (“From Edwards to Emerson,” p. 185).Google Scholar The term art could be added to this list without distorting Miller's point.
51. See Sontag, Susan, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), pp. 110–12.Google Scholar See also Gombrich, E. H., “The Visual Image,” Scientific American 227 (09 1972): 82–96.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
52. “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” Atlantic Monthly 3 (1859): 747.Google Scholar The notions of separating the world and its image and of “packaging” the landscape are also discussed in Boorstin, Daniel J., The Image (1962; rpt. New York: Harper-Colophon, 1964)Google Scholar, passim; Percy, Walker, “The Loss of the Creature,” in The Message in the Bottle (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), pp. 46–63Google Scholar; and Sontag, , On Photography, pp. 63 ff., 178 ff.Google Scholar
53. See Novak, Barbara, “Landscape Permuted: From Painting to Photography,” Artforum 14 (Autumn 1975): 40–45.Google Scholar For further discussion of Weston's abstracting concerns, see Trachtenberg, Alan, “Weston's ‘Thing Itself,’” Yale Review 64 (1975): 112–14Google Scholar; and Sontag, , On Photography, pp. 90–103.Google Scholar
54. Sontag, , On Photography, p. 15.Google Scholar
55. Cooper, James Fenimore, The Pioneers (1823; rpt. New York: New American Library, 1964), p. 218.Google Scholar See also the incredible pigeon-shooting scene in this novel (pp. 232 ff.).
56. Quoted in Kasson, , Civilizing the Machine, p. 118.Google Scholar
57. Quoted in Miller, , “Nature and the National Ego,” in Errand into the Wilderness, pp. 205–6.Google Scholar
58. Quoted in Novak, Barbara, “American Landscape: The Nationalist Garden and the Holy Book,” Art in America 60 (01–02 1972): 48.Google Scholar
59. It must be said that not all artists saw the meeting of civilization and nature as ultimately ruinous. See Novak, , “American Landscape,”Google Scholarpassim; Novak, Barbara, “The Double-Edged Axe,” Art in America 64 (01–02 1976): 45–50Google Scholar; and Novak, Barbara, Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting, 1825–1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980)Google Scholar, chs. 1 and 8, where these matters are discussed extensively and intelligently. See also Miller, , “Nature and the National Ego,” pp. 214–16.Google Scholar James Fenimore Cooper's complex attitudes toward this struggle are discussed brilliantly in Thomas, Brook, “The Pioneers, or the Sources of American Legal History: A Critical Tale,” American Quarterly 36 (1984): 86–111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Ironies abound in the ongoing drama between nature and civilization. Nash, Roderick, in Wilderness (p. 44)Google Scholar, reminds us that “appreciation of wilderness began in the cities.” Strictly speaking, the “cities” referred to were not always very large, and indeed were sometimes little more than pastoral villages like Concord. But the point is well taken, for “appreciation of wilderness” was a product of two highly civilized groups of individuals–artists and intellectuals—and not of woodsmen or settlers.
60. For discussion of these matters, see Butor, Michel, “Rothko: The Mosques of New York,” in Inventory by Butor, Michel, ed. and trans. Howard, Richard, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), pp. 271–74Google Scholar; Mathews, Jane De Hart, “Art and Politics in Cold War America,” American Historical Review 81 (1976): 762–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; David, and Shapiro, Cecile, “Abstract Expressionism in Cold War America,” Prospects 3 (1977): 175–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ausfeld, Margaret Lynne, “Circus Girl Arrested,” in Ausfeld, Margaret Lynne, ed., Advancing American Art: Politics and Aesthetics in the State Department Exhibition, 1946–1948, (Montgomery: Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, 1984), pp. 11–32Google Scholar; Blake, Casey, “Aesthetic Engineering,” Democracy 1 (1981): 37–50Google Scholar; Ashton, Dore, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (New York: Viking, 1973), p. 233Google Scholar, and chs. 9–11; and Guilbaut, Serge, How New York Stole the Idea of the Modern: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)Google Scholar, passim. Of course, many nineteenth-century artists were affluent, having been patronized by the wealthy, but art itself did not become integrated into the middle-class consumer economy until the mid-twentieth century.
61. Simply recall Weston's abhorrence at the thought that someone might see dollars in a vegetable where he saw only beauty. See Gee, Helen, “Photography of the Fifties,” in Gee, Helen, ed., Photography of the Fifties: An American Perspective (Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, 1980), pp. 15 ff.Google Scholar
62. The term social landscape was coined in 1966, first in Twelve Photographers of the American Social Landscape (Waltham, Mass.: Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, 1966)Google Scholar and then in Lyons, Nathan, ed., Contemporary Photographers: Toward a Social Landscape (Rochester, N.Y.: George Eastman House, 1966), pp. 5–7Google Scholar (see Green, Jonathan, American Photography: A Critical History, 1945 to the Present [New York: Harry W. Abrams, 1984], pp. 105 ff.).Google Scholar For examples of work by photographers who fit this/category, see also Frank, Robert, The Americans (1958; rpt. New York: Aperture, 1959)Google Scholar; and Krims, Les, The Deerslayers: A Limited Edition Folio (Rochester, N.Y.: Les Krims, 1972).Google Scholar Ansel Adams, it must be said in fairness, reasserted the earlier concern over the consequences of the “axe of civilization” by his tireless efforts and generosity in propagandizing the cause of conservation for the Sierra Club. Still, his photographs do not acknowledge the struggle itself as a subject or obvious theme. Instead, they dramatize the beauty and grandeur of an untouched, highly idealized nature.
