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Photography Review: Edward Weston at the MFA

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Over the weekend I paid a visit to the MFA in Boston — my first in over a year. In the hours  I spent wandering through the museum’s impressive collections and newest exhibitions, nothing held my attention quite so raptly as one tiny room of black-and-white photographs by Edward Weston. Simple and luminous, many of his pictures capture the effects of American civilization on landscapes as varied as the green hills of Ohio and the white sands of New Mexico.

The collection — on loan from the Lane Collection — is titled “Leaves of Grass” after Walt Whitman’s masterwork, perhaps the greatest of American poems. In 1941, Weston was hired by the Limited Editions Club of New York to illustrate its two-volume limited edition of Leaves of Grass (of which a copy is available for display in the gallery). The photographer subsequently took off on a road trip that brought him and his wife from New England to the  Southeast and back across the country to their native California.

Circling the collection, I could not look away from the image of a narrow road snaking its way through the moonlit fields of Connecticut farmlands — just as my attention was held by the picture of a Louisiana plantation house far into decline. Weston’s photographs in some way capture the thrill of being a traveler, of stumbling upon something that is at once new and ancient. It is the thrill of both discovery and recognition.

While Whitman’s poetry is often extravagant in its descriptions and range (and at times even a little rough around the edges), Weston’s photographs are controlled, subdued, and exacting. However, the subject of the collection is really no different from that of Whitman’s opus. Both these pictures and the poem are a meditation on America, in all its variety and contradictions. At the start of the exhibition, you can glimpse a quote from Weston that just about says it all: “I do believe . . . I can and will do the best work of my life. Of course I will never please everyone with my America — wouldn’t try to.”

Weston’s “Leaves of Grass” will be on view at the MFA on December 31, 2012.

Will Holt also blogs at Letters from a Bay Stater, where this entry was first posted.

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group–an award-winning PR and marketing firm based in Cambridge, MA.

 

 



Brown and Warren keep their promise: no third party ads

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By Will Holt

On August 20,  the Boston Globe published a front-page story by staff writer Noah Bierman titled “Brown, Warren pledge holds up.” In January, Bierman writes, Senator Scott Brown and Professor Elizabeth Warren agreed to keep third-party ads out of the Massachusetts Senate race despite their recent inundation of airwaves elsewhere across the country.

This agreement between the Republican incumbent and his Democratic challenger comes only two years after the decision in the now-infamous Citizens United case, in which the United States Supreme Court effectively ruled — to put it rather bluntly — that money is speech and corporations are people in the realm of campaign finance law. Whatever one thinks of either Warren or Brown, they’re certainly bucking a national trend.

With an eye toward the rest of the country in this heated election season, Bierman writes that over $90 million have been in spend in 13 states with Senate races this year alone. None of this money, trickling down from political action committees (PACs) and other interest groups, has so much as paid for a sound bite in the election here in Massachusetts.

You have to wonder how the candidates are making this work in what might very well be one of the country’s most acrimonious, grudging, and competitive Senate race this year. But early on they came up with a relatively simple solution: every time a third-party group runs an advertisement, the party that benefits from the advertisement’s message must make a donation to charity directly out of its own coffers.

The Brown-Warren pledge represents a model for the rest of the country, one that should be strictly adhered to in an election season that promises to be rife with a slew of misinformation and even outright lies. And while I’ll refrain from coming down in this post for one candidate or the other, I should mention that I have a great deal of respect for both Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren in light of this agreement. At least the candidates are speaking for themselves.

–Will Holt also blogs at Letters from a Bay Stater, where this blog initially appeared.  http://williambrianholt.wordpress.com/

 

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning  marketing and communications firm.