Brett Weston - Europe
Brett Weston - Europe
Volume 8 in the Portfolios of Brett Weston
Introduction by Gerald Robinson
Afterword by Roger Aikin
Softbound Edition of 1000 Copies
Printed by SALTO in 600 Line Screen Quadtone
12 reproductions, 48 pages
12 1/2 x 12 1/2
Brett Weston made these twelve photographs during several trips to Europe, the three photographs from 1960 with an 8 x 10 view camera, the rest in the early 1970s with a Rollei SL66, a camera that facilitated Weston's natural development towards the abstraction and two-dimensionality that mark his later work.
Weston dedicated this portfolio to his great friend and patron, Merle Armitage (1893 - 1975), a self-educated jack-of-all-trades and impresario who co-founded the Los Angeles Grand Opera Association, managed the Philharmonic Auditorium in Los Angeles in the 1930s, and invented the Hollywood Bowl. More important for photography, Armitage was president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts and art director of Quick and Look Magazine as well a book designer and author with over one hundred books to his credit. Many of the books he wrote or designed featured the artists, composers, and performers with whom he was associated. He published the first important books about both Edward and Brett Weston and was their lifelong patron. Armitage was still a blur of energy and much in demand as a speaker well into his late seventies.
Gerald Robinson, who wrote the introduction, is an attorney, photographer, and patron in Portland, Oregon, who knew Weston well and often entertained and photographed with him in Oregon. Robinson is also a gifted writer and critic, and his unpublished essay on Brett Weston contains important information and perceptive observations about Weston's life and work. Weston's next portfolio, Oregon, of 1975, was dedicated to Robinson.
From the 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.