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The exhibit opened on Saturday and will continue through Feb. 12.
"Throughout his nearly 70-year career, photographer Brett Weston was obsessed with abstracted micro-images of reality, as well as of cities and landscapes captured by a long telephoto lens that diminished the depth of field, thus flattening the image, organizers noted."
The display features 23 vintage Weston photographs that were part of a 2015 gift to the museum from the Christian Keesee Collection. Keesee, who is a collector and philanthropist, acquired the vintage prints from the Brett Weston Estate in 1996 and then created an archive to organize and catalog the works, as well as increase public awareness of the artist.
"Whatever the subject, the images are crisp, flattened, black and white, and brilliantly composed but not staged," noted Susan Ball, Bruce Museum deputy director and curator of the exhibition.
Weston used medium and large-format cameras and usually contact printed directly from the negative, selecting his subjects carefully rather than relying on manipulation in the dark room. He rarely cropped images and only occasionally used an enlarger, but not until the 1960s when the technology became sophisticated enough to meet his exacting standards. His subjects became increasingly less recognizable as time progressed.
Weston gained international recognition when he was only 17, when he and his father, Edward Weston, were included in an avant-garde exhibition at Film und Foto in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1929.
Three years later, he had his first one-person museum retrospective in San Francisco, and frequently exhibited in the 1930s with the California group of photographers known as Group f.64 -- named for the aperture setting.
The Bruce Museum is at 1 Museum Drive, in Greenwich. For more information about the museum and its exhibits, visit its website or call 203-869-0376.
This exhibit is supported by the Deborah G. and Charles M. Royce Exhibition Fund and the Connecticut Office of the Arts.
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