Cabbage Leaf

1931

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“Edward Weston: Masterworks From the Collection” is on view at the Oakland Museum of California through June 11.

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Where his contemporary and colleague Ansel Adams saw timeless harmony in nature, Edward Weston saw dynamic energy. His views were a melange of the “life force” described by French philosopher Henri Bergson and the all-pervasive eroticism of English novelist D. H. Lawrence, whom Weston photographed in Mexico in 1924. The sensuousness Weston felt coursing through all existence was manifest in the way vegetable, mineral and animal subjects became metaphors for one another in his photographs. He made many nude studies of his lovers, but the closest he ever came to the pornographic was his famous 1930 picture of a bell pepper.

This cabbage leaf is typical of Weston’s vision, and typically beautiful. Isolated against a black background, it is a lava flow surging down a volcano, the undulating grain of a desiccated cypress tree, the seaweed writhing in the surf at China Cove or the hair of his lover and muse Charis Wilson floating above her naked body. It is the universal principle of ceaseless flux in nature in which Weston believed.