Edward Weston (American, 1886–1958)
Pepper No. 25, 1929
Gelatin silver print
Norton Simon Museum, PH.1970.132
Gift of Mr. Shirley C. Burden, in memory of Flobelle Fairbanks Burden

Edward Weston had an early passion for still-life photographs, most famously his hyper-detailed portraits of shells and vegetables. His diaries record a sensory relationship with these objects. Of Pepper No. 25 he wrote: “I am working now with . . . peppers of marvelous convolutions. . . It has been suggested that I am a cannibal to eat my models after a masterpiece. But I rather like the idea that they become a part of me, enrich my blood as well as my vision.” For most of his career, Weston, unlike Álvarez Bravo, refused to engage with contemporary events, which he felt detracted from the study of pure form. Frustrated by the seeming shift among photographers toward political commentary, he wrote to his friend Ansel Adams that “there is just as much ‘social significance’ in a rock as in a line of unemployed.” He did not begin to photograph the California agricultural landscape until toward the end of the Great Depression, when he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to do so. Weston differed from contemporaries such as Dorothea Lange, who documented the lives of migrant workers, in that he focused on the aesthetic qualities of food production rather than on labor itself.