Download PDF scan of original article

Though William Wegman lived in the Los Angeles area for less than three years, it was during his Southern California sojourn that he reached maturity as an artist and learned to rely on his complex intelligence and galumphing comic ingenuity. The impact of this work in photography and video was both regional—his first solo museum show was in LA—and international.

Wegman’s earliest photographic works had been documents of ephemeral sculpture (as had those of his friend Robert Cumming, who shot both his own and Wegman’s work). Just prior to moving west, however, he had “discovered” the inherent potential of the photograph as an instrument for dissecting the social conventions to which we adhere in picturing our world.

Employing absurdly simple strategies (cropping, captioning, flipping the negative when making a print), Wegman deftly and humorously deflates the photograph of its fundamental pretense.