Dunes, Oceano, 1936

During the 1930s, the coastal sand dunes in Oceano, California, were the home to artists, writers, and assorted misfits, mystics, and nudists who were collectively known as the 'Dunites.' They published a magazine, the Dune Forum, whose first issue, in late 1933, featured a cover photo by Edward Weston's son Chandler. At the urging of Chandler and his brother Brett, Edward Weston himself made five Oceano studies in 1934 (numbered in the 'SO' series, short for 'Soil') and nearly fifty more in 1936. They mark his greatest achievement in landscape photography. Of these, the two in the present collection, '37SO' and '45SO' (Lot 37), commonly known as Black Dunes and White Dunes, respectively, were selected by photo-historians Beaumont and Nancy Newhall for inclusion in their seminal 1958 book Masters of Photography, and ever since have been the two most celebrated and reproduced dunes in the series.