Brett Weston - San Francisco

Brett Weston - San Francisco

from $74.95

Volume 1 in the Portfolios of Brett Weston series

Afterword by Roger Aikin

Softbound Edition of 1000 Copies
Printed by SALTO in 600 Line Screen Quadtone
10 reproductions, 32 pages

12 1/2" x 12 1/2"

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From the Afterword by Roger Aikin: Although made by a man only in his late twenties, these pictures reveal an artist with a confident, original style and prodigious technique whole interests and methods are fully mature. They are technically and formally exquisite: every tree and telephone pole is in sharp focus and every tone is rendered with clarity and precision. Even at this early date, Brett reveals his penchant for bold contrast ad rich blacks and whites—a way of seeing the world that continued through his last works.

Published in 1939, the ten photographs in Brett Weston's San Francisco portfolio were originally offered for sale at a price significantly lower than each of the photographs if purchased individually. The market for fine photographs was over thirty years away and Weston sold only three portfolios. Because most of the photographs that were included were never printed again, this is a side of Weston's oeuvre unknown to all but a few. The original portfolio included no printed text. The book contains an Afterword by Roger Aikin.

THE PORTFOLIOS OF BRETT WESTON

A NINETEEN-VOLUME SERIES

Between 1939 and 1980 Brett Weston produced eighteen limited edition portfolios of original photographs. He believed passionately in the power of his original prints and chose the portfolio as the way to reach an expanded audience while still maintaining control over image quality. Today, Weston's original portfolios are rare, expensive, and relatively inaccessible in museums, archives, libraries, or private collections. Many of the photographs in these new books have never before been reproduced. Published in a hardbound edition limited to 250 numbered copies. The softbound edition is limited to 1000 copies, and books are available individually or by subscription.

Printing technology now makes it possible, however, to bring the Brett Weston portfolios to a larger audience in reproductions that, in their rich detail, tonal scale and color, surface quality, and aesthetic appeal, are almost indistinguishable from the original prints. Printed in Belgium by Salto in 600-line screen quadtone on heavy coated stock, the photographs have been reproduced actual size whenever possible.

To recreate the feeling of the original portfolios, great care has been taken not only with the reproduction of the photographs, but with every aspect of these books. Where there is text in the portfolios, it is reproduced in facsimile, and the color of each book's cover has been selected to match the covers of the original portfolio cases.

The art historian Roger Aikin, a close friend of Brett's, has provided an introductory essay for each book in the series, writing that sets the photographs in the context of Weston's life and career. Dr. Aikin's critical analysis comparing the photographs of Brett and those of his father, published in 1973, remains the finest analysis of its type we have ever seen.