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Lucien Clergue & Edward Weston
 
Tom Beck, in Lucien Clergue, reports Clergue to be convinced that "his images have
their roots in the 4600 years of human history and experience
centered around Arles." Clergue draws his artistic practice from a
place steeped in the mythology of the Mediterranean; something he
views not as fable or fiction but symbolic truth. This concern with
mythology is seen most vividly in Clergue's photographs of natural
formations of the earth.
Growing out of Clergue's earlier landscape
work in France, Clergue's 1988 study Footprints of the Gods: The
Point Lobos Saga finds some of its inspiration in the work of Edward
Weston. A region of California that was made known by Weston's
photography, Clergue argues that it was here Weston went about
"opening our eyes." Regardless of Weston's protests to the contrary,
Clergue sees in Weston's work the symbolic transformation of "the
idea of the vegetable forms to the rocks and trees of Point Lobos."
Where Weston actively denied in his famous Daybooks any sexual
symbolism in his photography of natural forms, Clergue's photography
of Point Lobos self-consciously seeks resemblance between the shapes
of human form, sexuality and fecundity in the earth itself.
UCR/CMP director Jonathan Green has observed that Weston's
photography "consistently values lucidity over chaos, clarity and
simplicity over disorder." Green explains, "It is a gesture that
postulates [that] the 'essential' and 'the thing itself' -- terms
Weston used with great respect -- were not the natural, the
perfected, or the beautiful, but rather the aesthetic act of
organization and description that signaled human potential and
cultural construction."
While it would be wrong to deny that Weston's
artistic technique has influenced Clergue's, Weston's denial of
transcendent categories such as the "natural, the perfected or the
beautiful" may be identified as the point where Weston and Clergue
come into disagreement. For as Clergue explains his work at Point
Lobos was precisely "to get back to origins ... those signs left by
gods and goddesses." Clergue writes of what he found at Point Lobos:
And the questions remain for all eternity: why, why, why? Why are
there two sexes, man and woman? Why is there a bestiary, making you
think of Hieronymus Bosch? Why this dream of nature? Why death,
suddenly all around you? Why? Why? Why?
Next: Clergue's Recent Work
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