Edward Weston

signed and titled by the photographer in pencil on the reverse, matted, 1935

The photographer to his sister, Mary Weston Seaman

By descent to her daughter, Jeannette Seaman

By descent to her nephew, John W. Longstreth

The Dayton Art Institute, Edward Weston's Gifts to His Sister, January - March 1978, and traveling to:

New York, International Center of Photography, July - September 1978; and

The Oakland Museum, February - March 1979

The Dayton Art Institute, Edward Weston: A Photographer's Love of Life, February - July 2004, and traveling to:

Oregon, Portland Art Museum, September - November 2004

Omaha, Joslyn Art Museum, January - April 2005; and

Rochester, George Eastman House, April - September 2005

This print:

Kathy Kelsey Foley, Edward Weston's Gifts to His Sister (The Dayton Art Institute, 1978, in conjunction with the exhibition), p. 46

Alexander Lee Nyerges, Edward Weston: A Photographer's Love of Life (The Dayton Art Institute, 2004, in conjunction with the exhibition), pl. 29

Another print of this image:

Conger 918

This early print, on heavy single-weight paper with a surface sheen and with a rich, dark tonality, is in generally very good to excellent condition. The corners are bumped, and edges are rubbed, with tiny emulsion losses, particularly at the right and left edges. When examined in raking light, age-appropriate silvering is visible in the dark areas, as well as a pencil-point indentation not breaking the emulsion. The notations, 'EWP23' and '736' (marked out), are written in unidentified hands in pencil on the reverse.
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Possibly taken at the Salton Sea, located in the California desert southeast of Palm Springs, this photograph depicts one of the area's many naturally-occurring sandstone concretions.  Created in 1905 by a levee break in the Colorado River, the Salton Sea is actually a large saline lake that occupies the Salton Basin, which, like Death Valley, lies below sea level.  A concretion is a compact mass of mineral matter, or sedimentary rock cement, typically carried into place by ground water.  On occasion the concretion, or sand erosion, as they are sometimes called, will become embedded in another larger rock, as in the example photographed by Weston here.  He must have enjoyed the concretions' naturally abstracted forms and is known to have made five studies of them, including the photograph offered here.  

Conger points out that this image was used by Weston as one of his Print-of-the-Month-Club selections.  As a Print-of-the-Month, it would have been printed in some quantity, and Weston's log in the Center for Creative Photography lists up to 37 prints from this negative (107R).  Few seemed to have survived, however: in addition to the print in the Edward Weston Archive at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Conger locates prints only in three institutions: The Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Indiana University Art Museum in Bloomington.