Different styles. Weston took some wonderful shots in the mountains whenever AA managed to drag him up there. But a shot of a juniper tree looked sensual just like his nudes, while AA's portraits look brilliantly detailed and analytic just like his landscapes. I saw actual Weston prints long before AA's, which I knew only from magazine repros or student copies. We lived just across the river from Yosemite and my parent didn't let me go into Best Studio because it was rigged with all kinds of fragile little ceramic chipmunks and so forth, hoping that some little brat like me would knock them over, which did happen once, and my dad had to pay. At that time, one could buy ten small AA prints for forty bucks (assistant-printed, no doubt). I never saw AA's personal work until I was doing my own color gigs practically in his backyard on the coast; and at that point, I became far more impressed with Brett Weston as a printmaker than either of the elders. But having grown up in the
Sierra, and having since traveled tens of thousands of miles of backcountry with large format cameras, I certainly have the capacity to appreciate AA's sensitivity to the light in a manner his flatlander naysayers do not, like my older brother's instructors at the Brooks Institute back then. Yeah, at times I do get annoyed with images that are overtly theatrical; but there are many others out there less well known that are remarkable. ... and of course, tons of so-so near-misses. But some
of those were deliberately low-contrast printed for sake of offset reproduction, and inadvertently made their way onto the peripheral print market. The notion that anyone hits a home every time is just nonsense. Even Babe Ruth struck out far
more often.