Pepper No. 30

In the late 1920s Weston began taking a series of close-up images of different objects that he called "still lifes".

For several years he experimented with a variety of images of shells, vegetables and fruits, and in 1927 he made his first photograph of a pepper.

He wrote: It was a bright idea, a perfect relief for the pepper and adding reflecting light to important contours.

It has no psychological attributes, no human emotions are aroused: this new pepper takes one beyond the world we know in the conscious mind.

To be sure, much of my work has this quality...but this one, and in fact all of the new ones, take one into an inner reality, ‒ the absolute, ‒ with a clear understanding, a mystic revealment.

She wrote: There are many reasons for this, the long, smooth, barely turned surfaces; the glow of the light reflecting unpredictably on the firm skin; the gentle "S" curves ‒ all factors enhanced by the almost exaggerated contrasts between light and dark, concave and convex, abstract and tactile; the firm waxed surfaces toughing the scratched tin.

[6] At the same time he expressed candid frustration with those who described his peppers in sexual tones: The peppers which are libeled more than anything I have done, ‒ in them has been found vulvas, penises or combinations, sexual intercourse, Madonna with child, wrestlers, modern sculpture, African carving, ad nauseam, according to the state of mind of the spectator: and I have a lot of fun sizing up people from their findings!

Now call the above explanation my defense mechanism become active, I say that it is disgust and weariness over having my work labeled and pigeonholed by those who bring to it their own obviously abnormal, frustrated condition: the sexually unemployed belching gaseous irrelevancies from an undigested Freudian ferment.