Brett Weston - Japan
Brett Weston - Japan
Volume 7 in the Portfolios of Brett Weston
Afterword by Roger Aikin
Softbound Edition of 1000 Copies
Printed by SALTO in 600 Line Screen Quadtone
15 reproductions, 44 pages
12 1/2 x 12 1/2
Weston visited Japan only once, in 1970, and produced the Japan portfolio that same year. Besides new subjects and textures, he was obviously fascinated with Japanese architecture, design, and calligraphy, and he seems also to have absorbed something of the style of Japanese art.
For example, in contrast to conventions of perspective in Western paintings, which tend to move horizontally and employ a single vanishing point, Japanese (and Chinese) landscape paintings tend to move or "read" from top to bottom (as does Japanese writing), and to employ ichnographic perspective, which has no single vanishing point and also implies a distant point of view.
Weston seems to give a nod to this Oriental aesthetic with the five landscapes he includes here. . . . In other words, Weston's personal artistic interests seem to mesh with the Japanese environment and the style of Japanese art. He was clearly fascinated with the new shapes and textures of Japan, and he rhymes these shapes and textures across the portfolio.
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.