Century Plant, Hawaii

c. 1980

Century Plant, Hawaii, c. 1980. Brett Weston (American, 1911–1993). Gelatin silver print; image: 27 x 28.8 cm (10 5/8 x 11 5/16 in.); paper: 27.9 x 35.5 cm (11 x 14 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of the Christian Keesee Collection 2017.165 © The Brett Weston Archive Weston’s photographs are about the act of seeing, of translating his experience of the world into visual terms. His images hover between abstraction and representation. “It seems to me,” Weston wrote, “that this powerful duality, this combination of the abstract, in the emphasis upon form, and the sense of presence, in the rendering of light and substance, is something only photography can do.”