The pepper No. 30

       The Pepper No. 30 is one of Edward Weston’s most popular works. Edward Weston was an American photographer and also the co-founder of Group f/64, a group of seven San Francisco photographers in 20th century sharing a new photographic style of sharp focus and contrast on the contrary of the Pictorialist photographic style in the early 1900s. Weston was born in Highland Park, Illinois on March 24, 1886. After he received his first camera on his sixteenth birthday, his interest in photography was soon blossomed into a passion that he studied photography at Illinois College of Photography and later decided to pursue a career in photography after he moved to California in 1906. In 1922, as a photographer, he started a transition from pictorialism into straight photography, pure photography, that he attempted to depict a scene as realistically and objectively as permitted by the medium, as defined by Group f/64 that “[P]pure photography is defined as possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form.”After 1927, Weston focused most of his works on still life, nudes and his studies of shells and vegetable. 

       As most of his other works, The Pepper No. 30, a black-and-white photo, was also done using an eight by ten inch view camera. The image contains only one pepper in the middle with dark background, high contrast and sharp edge. Referring to what Weston called a straight photograph, the image appears evenly sharp from foreground to background which this particular style was in opposition to the pictorialist soft-edge methods that were still in fashion at the time. The overall value of this image is dark, but its high contrast highlights the curve contour of the pepper. The image is well balanced, but there is no ground surface for where the pepper was put I could see in the photo. The pepper, I couldn’t tell the color, has a funny shape to me. When I first saw the photo, it looked like a tightly closed mouth and also a first, a boxing gloves. I was amazed by how dramatic this little photograph looks to me. Although it is just a still life photograph of a pepper sitting in the dark background, somehow I could feel an emotion of the pepper. It might be an effect of the expressional shape of the pepper or its dark back ground, the pepper in the photo seems to be angry and about to shout out its anger to me. I was amazed how Weston could find such an emotional pepper or pictured so well that he seemed to give the pepper a spirit and emotion.


image from: http://www.masters-of-photography.com/