View from Wildcat Hill: Edward Weston’s longtime home and studio in Carmel.
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Is love like art – something always ahead, never quite attained.
Edward Weston
My father and I talked a lot about art, and one day when we ended up on the subject of photography, he took to a framed photo of his parents and opened it up and showed me the stamp on the back. Edward Weston. One of those moments where the past suddenly isn’t past anymore, it’s right there in your hands, tangible, real. My grandparents’ wedding photo. Shot by Edward Weston.
This was back in the Los Angeles days. Glendale, to be specific, back when Tropico was still Tropico and before it got swallowed up by suburban sprawl. My grandfather and Weston were friends. They’d disappear into the San Gabriel Mountains together, the Santa Monica range. This was before Wildcat Hill. Before the legend got cemented into the California coast like those rocks at Point Lobos he’d spend the rest of his life photographing.
In 1938, Weston’s 22-year-old son Neil built him a house in the Carmel Highlands for $999. Think about that. Not even a grand. One room. Darkroom at one end, fireplace at the other. That’s it. That’s all this man needed to create some of the most important photographs in American history.
The darkroom? A six-foot sink, a print frame, a lightbulb. No fancy equipment. No shortcuts. Weston hauled an 8×10 view camera, a beast of a thing, and only made contact prints. The final image was exactly the size of the negative. No cropping. No manipulation. No bullshit. You got it right in the camera or you didn’t get it at all.
Wildcat Hill overlooked the Pacific, perched just south of Point Lobos where he’d spend twenty years making pictures of rocks and waves and kelp that somehow looked like bodies, like landscapes, like everything and nothing at once. He died there on New Year’s Day, 1958. Parkinson’s had stolen his ability to photograph years earlier, but he spent that time printing, cataloging, making sure the work survived. His ashes went into the Pacific at Point Lobos. They even renamed the beach for him.