Nude (Charis, Santa Monica)

It shows an apparently nude woman with her arms wrapped around her legs while she sits on a blanket in bright sunlight against a darkened doorway.

The dynamic balance of the light and dark accentuate the curves and angles of the woman's body; at the same time her face and all but the slightest hint of her pubic area are hidden from view, requiring the viewer to concentrate on her arms, legs, feet and hands.

The Great Depression years of the early 1930s were hard on Weston, who, in spite of his relative fame, struggled to make ends meet.

In early 1935 he closed his studio in Glendale and moved into a house with his three sons Brett, Cole and Neil at 446 Mesa Road in Santa Monica, California.

Later he wrote "I laughingly blame Ch[aris] for cramping my style as a writer ‒ and there may be some truth in this charge ‒ but the fact is that I have not had much time, nor necessary aloneness for keeping an intimate journal.

The light he loves best is almost axial with the lens ‒ the same light-angle at which a news photographer's flash flattens faces and collapses space with its fake shadows.

Because of the extreme contrast between the bright sun on skin and the dark shadows of the doorway, prints from this negative required both burning and dodging.