Conger, Edward Weston: Photographs from the Collection of the Center for Creative Photography, fig. 1248 Weston and Wilson, California and the West, n.p. Foley, Edward Weston’s Gifts to His Sister, p. 51 Enyeart, Edward Weston’s California Landscapes, pl. 102 Newhall, Supreme Instants: The Photography of Edward Weston, cat. 88 Heyman, Seeing Straight: The f64 Revolution in Photography, pl. 57
Catalogue Essay
In mid-February 1938, Edward Weston and his wife Charis traveled to Yosemite to stay with their close friends Ansel and Virginia Adams, and also to photograph. This picture of Adams’s darkroom buried under a thick blanket of snow was made on this trip. Not long after they arrived in Yosemite, heavy snow began falling. As Charis wrote, ‘The third day dawned a fine blue and Edward went berserk. Everywhere he looked there was something to photograph, but . . . it was an almost impossible place to work because every minute a new load of overhead snow comes dumping down on the camera, or once, into the open case just as we were changing holders. . . Neil [Weston’s son] and I used our bodies to break paths for Edward through waist-deep snow, and tramped it down hard in a circle wherever he set up the camera, to keep the legs from punching through and sliding down to China along with the camera.’ The Westons included Ansel Adams’s Darkroom in their acclaimed 1940 book, California and the West.
1938 Gelatin silver print. 7 1/2 x 9 3/8 in. (19.1 x 23.8 cm) Initialed and dated in pencil on the mount; signed, titled and dated in pencil on the reverse of the mount.
