Monterey Museum of Art, Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History, PK Fine Artifacts

Monterey Museum of Art

A fortuitous premium that can be yours for no extra charge at the current photography exhibition at Monterey Museum of Art, Through the Lens…Portraiture and Photography, is the satisfaction of seeing significant works not only by major photographers but also their subjects. These include Ansel Adams, Edward and Cole Weston and others of the Weston group.

“Our collection reflects the passion of this community for photography,” says Marcelle Polednik, MMA director of collections and exhibitions. 

Works by Adams, the Westons and Cunningham and are well represented, as are other notable artists, less well known, who worked here.

“Henry Gilpin’s iconic image of the coastline and Highway 1, a ribbon between sea and land, is the picture people worldwide recognize as Big Sur,” Polodnick says. Gilpen met Ansel Adams at a Yosemite workshop in the ‘50s and moved to Monterey, where he taught workshops and a generation of students at Monterey Peninsula College. Wynn Bullock is here too, a lifelong friend of Edward Weston who continues to photograph stunning nudes.

And there’s Anne Brigman, who “was a groundbreaking and very well known pictorialist photographer in the ‘teens; she lived and worked here for a time and created some of her most famous works here, nudes within landscapes,” says Polodnick. Quite avant garde for her era, Brigman was the only woman and the only photographer west of the Mississippi accepted by Stieglitz in his 1903 photo-secession show. She profoundly influenced Weston and Cunningham. (For a wonderful first-person account of her trip to New York for that show, visit cla.purdue.edu/waaw/palmquist/Photographers/BrigmanEssay.htm.) Pulodnick names several exceptional photographers working here now who continue the tradition of Peninsula groundbreakers: Robin Robinson (unbelievable black-and-white underwater photography), Tom Millet (known for luscious platinum printed portraits, now working digitally), Martha Casanave (an influential teacher whose recent works are haunting images using pinhole photography), Brad Cole (uncannily direct portraits) and Mark Dubovoy (a major force in color photography). 

“These artists show the versatility of this medium and how artists continue to stretch the limits,” Polednik says.

Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History

The Broader View: Panoramic Photography by Dave Monley at the PG Museum of Natural History certainly pushes the limits. These 360-degree color landscapes are breathtaking, not only for the beauty they capture, but for their technical brilliance.

“In the past it was only by using incredibly expensive panoramic cameras with special film that such work could be done. I shoot these in vertical sections and then, by using a computer, layer them together, adjusting the computer settings to compensate for the different perspectives,” he says.

His work is highly technical, but he makes no apologies. “In modern times we almost have too much respect for art and too little for craft. Ansel Adams was very much a craftsman who wanted to have complete control of his medium,” Monley says.

PK Fine Artifacts

Another limit is stretched to capacity in the painted photographs that are collaborations between Kim Weston and Reed Farrington at PK Fine Artifacts. Kim Weston learned his craft assisting his father, Cole Weston, in the darkroom, making gallery prints from the original negatives of his grandfather, Edward Weston. Kim also worked as assistant to his uncle, Brett Weston.

“Through these great opportunities I learned a very valuable lesson about art,” he writes. “After spending countless hours and producing thousands of images in both my fathers’ and Brett’s darkrooms, I needed to prove that the image was not the most important part of the process, that the process itself held the rewards I was looking for. So for 10 years I made only one print of each image and mounted the negative on the back.

“The great thing about this thing we call art is that it has no rules. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Kim Weston’s work is exhibited worldwide. He is known for his exquisite craftsmanship as well as the images of nudes within portentious, highly-charged spaces. He also gives workshops at the famous Wildcat Hill ranch of his grandfather, and at photo centers around the world. In this exhibit, he teams up with Reed Farrington, known for his energetic, loose, brilliantly colorist oil paintings.

The two collaborated on this series of painted photographs, achieving images that are a new medium wherein the loose and bold strokes of color are applied as an abstraction over the poetic but literal photographs. “We try to do this together every couple of years, and the collaboration really has an effect on each of our work in the interim,” Weston says.