POINT LOBOS

Edward Weston

One of the true regenerative artist: an awakener of the eye and the evolving mind it serves. Regeneration was a quality that Weston brought to photography for more than three decades, defining both the limits and the generosities of his medium. Point Lobos was only one of his subjects, though he returned to it again and again, and took his last photograph there. His career spanned crucial years in American photography, and a restless pursuit of his art created a body of work that ranged over nudes, still lifes, industrial scenes, portraiture, landscape
In 1937 Weston became the first photographer to receive the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. For a year, he traveled around the western United States with Charis Wilson, creating large-scale landscapes, a subject he had not pursued in depth since his time in Mexico.

The grant was renewed in 1938, part of which Weston spent at his new residence in Carmel, developing and printing negatives made in the preceding months.Weston created some 1,400 negatives during this remarkably productive time, and his visual approach became increasingly expansive. His deliberate, methodical technique of the late 1920s and early 1930s, when he spent hours creating single still life arrangements in his studio, gave way to greater spontaneity and an embrace of diverse views. His frame now encompassed hills, valleys, and coastlines, not just the rocks and tree stumps found there. He directed his attention to less static subjects, incorporating moving elements such as breaking waves or drifting clouds. , and any other subject that touched his visual imagination

THE BLUE-WHITE GULLS

Among the Blue

Somehow I wish could say
it was indifference not love
that found the coordinates
for cormorants among the blue
the blue-white gulls

tell you that we have lived once
and will not come this way again

say to you that as long as art
teaches language of recovery
eternal reminders of morning
will grow on our sweat, spume,
tick softly on our lips, on our lips.

Gerry McGrath was born in Helensburgh, near Glasgow, in 1962 and studied at Strathclyde University before becominga teacher. He now lives in North Ayrshire with his wife, Kate, and young son, Liam. He worked as a teacher of modern languages for seven years until 2000. He received a Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Award in2004. His poems have appeared in Edinburgh Review, Being Alive, in Painted, Spoken and in PN Review, and a selection were published in Carcanet's New Poetries IV: An Anthology (2007).