Buddha of the bathroom

Edward Weston (1886-1958), Excusado, 1925, impressão em platina, 24.2 x 18.3 cm.

"Form follows function." Who said it I don't know but the writer spoke well! I have been photographing our toilet, that glossy receptacle of extraordinary beauty. It might be suspicioned that I am in a cynical mood to approach such subject matter when I might be doing beautiful women or “God’s out-of doors”, — or even considered that my mind holds lecherous images arising from restraint of appetite. But, no! My excitement was absolute aesthetic response to form. For long I have considered photographing this useful and elegant accessory to modern hygienic life, but not until I actually contemplated its image on my ground glass did I realize the possibilities before me. I was thrilled! — here was every sensuous curve of the "human form divine" but minus imperfection. Never did the Greeks reach a more significant consumation to their culture, and it somehow reminded me, in the glory of its chaste convulsions and in its swelling, sweeping, forward movement of finely progressing contours, of the Victory of Samothrace.
Edward Weston, The Daybooks of Edward Weston, vol. 1, entrada para 21 de Outubro de 1925. [Na ausência dos diários de Weston, reconstituí esta passagem através de várias citações fragmentárias: na In Focus de Dezembro de 2005, na Bartleby e no arquivo da George Eastman House. É uma das citações (em versão abreviada) que termina o livro de Susan Sontag, On Photography (1973), com edição portuguesa da D. Quixote (1986). Os "links" do texto pretendem ampliar a sua compreensão]


Louise Norton (1890-1989), "Buddha of the Bathroom", The Blind Man, nº2, New York, Maio de 1917. A sexualidade, na Fountain e no conjunto da obra de Duchamp, é discutida no "link" do título desta entrada e, em linguagem e estilo jornalísticos, no Independent