II

Light, woman and object.

What a wonderful pose and the shadow is also great. Well, I guess I do not like the vase ;-)

Margrethe in my Studio, about 1920. You left out the picture on the wall, though.

I definitely was going for an older look - the way she arranged her hair strengthens the association. The stylized pose reminds me of the 20's.

The Weston portrait of Margrethe I am familiar with is outside with the shadows of the tree on the wall. I need to pull a book or two down and see other images Weston did of her.

The one I was thinking of is reproduced in "Weston's Westons: Portraits and Nudes," toward the start. It is very much like this image, except that Margrethe is standing by a corner in the studio, and there is a photo on the wall. In the Weston, she's standing to the left of the flowerpot as you look at the image. She's wearing a long dress. Unlike your image, she's looking into the frame, and the light is coming from a different direction.

The flowers and vase were serendipitous... I have been shooting at friend's places just to jog my imagination and the vase was sitting in the corner. I think that some of the dried flowers in there are persimmon blossoms which I thought went with the Chinese dress I had bought the day before in New York.

I had done a "woman in still life" at the same friend's other house a couple years back... I was thinking of that when shooting.

I do (as my portfolio shows) consciously reproduce classic images - it's been helpful to me (even in failures) to grapple with lighting and figuring out (hands on) why a certain pose works vs. the number of variations around it. That said - I'm coming to the conclusion that it is sometimes difficult to do something "new" sometimes. I've been doing photography for photography's sake since April 2003. Before that I did snapshots on vacation. I remember in the summer of 2004 being in a class at the Maine Photographic Workshops showing some work in class and someone saying "You must really like Ruth Bernhard." And I said "Who?" I became very acquainted with her work afterwards (and picked up some prints) - and met her at Photo SF briefly in '05 I think.

I try not to let this all depress me:-)

To make yourself feel better, read Borges's work, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." It's a story in the form of a faux literary review about a 20th century writer who immerses himself so completely in Cervantes that he recreates "Don Quixote" line-by-line. However, as the "reviewer" points out, though the work is word-for-word identical, it has entirely different meanings, if for no other reason than that it was written four centuries after the original.