Alma Lavenson 1897-1989

The photographer to Susan Ehrens, Piedmont, California, as agent

Acquired by The Weston Gallery from the above, 1985

Acquired by the Southland Corporation, Dallas, from the above

Sotheby's New York, Photographs from The Collection of 7-Eleven, Inc., 5 April 2000, Sale 7448, Lot 7

Acquired by Margaret W. Weston from the above

Monterey Museum of Art, Passion and Precision: Photographs from the Collection of Margaret W. Weston, January - April 2003

Another print of this image:

Susan Ehrens, Alma Lavenson: Photographs (Berkeley, 1990), p. 16 (variant cropping)

Camera Craft, San Francisco, Vol. 38, No. 4 (April 1931), p. 187 (second prize, advanced competition)

Louis William Fox, 'Alma Lavenson--The Spirit of Place,' Artweek, Vol. 10, No. 7 (February 1979), p. 11

The image offered here was made a year after Alma Lavenson's first encounters with Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham, who by the later 1920s were proponents of the 'straight' style of photography--sharply-focused, clearly-defined, and with precise attention to surface detail. The self-taught Lavenson had begun photographing in 1919 in the then-fashionable Pictorialist style, but by 1931 had adopted the new, more objective approach to the medium. 

Although not an official member of Group f.64, whose members included Ansel Adams, Willard Van Dyke, John Paul Edwards, Henry Swift, Sonya Noskowiak, Cunningham, and Weston, Lavenson was invited to be a part of their pioneering exhibition at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco in 1932.

According to Lavenson authority Susan Ehrens, the print offered here is one of only two prints of the image extant.