After Edward Weston

Edward Weston’s famous images of peppers were photographed beautifully…but the peppers themselves were also a big reason for the success of these images.  He searched carefully for just the right peppers to photograph.  Back then produce was not so uniformly shaped as it is now.  In the past I have given students an assignment where they try to mimic the image of a master photographer…many have tried to make a Weston pepper. It can’t be done using the Frankenfood we now find in the grocery store where all the peppers look the same.   They are uniform copies of some template pepper. Shadows of the pepper within Plato’s cave perhaps.
This image started out with the idea of making a Weston-like pepper, in a surreal context and using photoshop to make the pepper more interesting in shape. However, as I progressed through several iterations, the idea changed. The final image I was left with at the end of the week has little resemblance to the original idea.  I am a careful planner of my art but there are always changes as you go. Nevertheless, there usually are not as many changes as took place with this image.  
In the end, I decided the pepper would be flying through space, so I photographed it by panning, with a flash on rear curtain sync., and I dragged the shutter to expose the background (sorry to non-photographer readers for the technical stuff). The point is that the left side of the image, up to half way across the pepper, is mostly a straight photograph.  On the other hand the right side is a composite of an exploding/melting/mutating pepper.   The left is real…the right is fake (and its clearly fake). That’s the idea: Weston was a member of the f-64 group and they believed in straight photography: clear, relatively un-manipulated images.   This image was made “After” Edward Weston…where most of us don’t concern ourselves with the purity of the image any more.  We live in a world that is so simulated and fake  we have little choice but to accept all the fakes and copies around us as real….there is nothing else.
Therefore, the title, “After Edward Weston” is a reference to the image, “After Walker Evans” by Sherrie Levine. In both cases we do not mean the image is a "homage to" as is usually indicated by the word "After" before an artists name. Levine rephotographed an image by another master photographer, Walker Evans, in order to debunk modern ideas about genius and originality and to bring to the fore postmodern concepts more related to appropriation, and the social nature of artistic creation.  I am doing something similar—I am washing my hands of a concern for straight photography, which was a modern infatuation, and instead I am embracing the simulacra. Fakes and copies are the reality of our shared post-modern existence. 
What happened "After" Edwards Weston made his photographs…well, real peppers were replaced with Frankenfood and supposedly "real" analogue photographs were replaced with digitally manipulated ones. I am not on a crusade against this. I think, for better or for worse,  most people seem to be fine with living in this new simulated world.   I’m not too worried about it.