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Platinum, 35 x 28 cm, 1930

In Edward Weston's masterpiece Pepper No. 30, 1930, an ordinary object is transformed into a profound presence. Powerful yet simple, this icon of American Modernism has embedded itself in our social consciousness. It is widely regarded as one of the most recognizable images in the history of art. Pepper No. 30 alters our perception. In it, a very particular pepper (rotspot and all) expands from something we see into that which we know. To view it is to enter a world where the ordinary is transformed into the extraordinary.

It is a classic, completely satisfying -a pepper- but more than a pepper: abstract, in that it is completely outside subject matter. It has no psychological attributes, no human emotions are aroused: this new pepper takes one beyond the world we know in the conscious mind‚ - take one into an inner reality, the absolute,- with a clear understanding, a mystic revealment. This is the 'significant presentation' that I mean, the presentation through one's intuitive self, seeing through one's eyes, not with them - the visionary.

What Weston called the "significant presentation" is perceived in Pepper No. 30 as vital beauty residing in the everyday. To be confronted with such heightened ordinariness is to activate our awareness of existence - the pepper's and our own. The role of the art-viewer before Modernism was to see what the artist intended. With Modernism, and its search for a utopian answer to the social, political and economic strife between World War I and World War II, intention was no longer relevant; the viewer became a participant and sensorial perception became the experience. László Moholy-Nagy, Weston's European contemporary, wrote of this new relationship in which the art-viewer "experiences a heightening of his own faculties, and becomes himself an active partner with the forces unfolding themselves." Weston concurred with this new role of art - and the camera.

To present the significance of facts, so that they are transformed from things seen to things known. Wisdom controlling the means - the camera - presents this knowledge in communicable form, so the spectator participates in the revelation.

In the photograph being offered, the interplay of light and shadow along the smooth firm skin of the pepper, defines the swelling, swirling curves of its voluminous form. It is a dynamic image - with upward thrusting and inward curving movement. Yet ultimately what we experience is a peaceful whole. The light, an encompassing glow, delivers a pepper from its earth-bound existence to a Modernist vision of the coherence, power and rhythm of life.

Life is a coherent whole: rocks, clouds, trees, shells, torso, smokestack, peppers, are interrelated, interdependent parts of the whole. Rhythm from one becomes symbols of all.

As with all of Weston's still-life studies, Pepper No. 30 was shot with a large-format camera mounted on a tripod. The clarity of his negative came from the artist's insistence on keeping the camera's lens opening as small as possible, for as long as possible - hours in this case.

Other prints of this image are in the collections of the George Eastman House, Rochester; Harry Ramson Center at The University of Texas at Austin; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Contact printed from original negative by master platinum printer Tom Millea in 2001. Titled, negative information and signed by Tom Millea and Kim Weston.

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