“At Oceano, in 1936, he made a majestic series: the dunes sculpted by wind and light, and against them, the total outline of the Nude—white on white, the skin glowing like a pearl and rounded by shadow from the dazzling sand.”
The bravura early print offered here is from Edward Weston’s now-iconic series of nude studies of Charis Wilson on the sands of Oceano, California. Between 1935 and 1937, Weston and Charis—his muse, lover, and eventual wife—made several trips to Oceano, staying for days at a t.mes in an abandoned guest cabin and sharing meals with a group of squatters known as the "Dunites.” Although Weston's primary goal was to photograph the region’s striking dunes, these visits also produced some of his most important and widely recognized nude studies.
In the present image—inarguably the most famous from the Oceano series—Charis’s nude form is bathed in even light and gently contoured by shadow, perfectly set against the soft, balanced mid-tones of the sand. To make this photograph, Weston positioned his tripod-mounted 8x10-inch camera on a dune across from where Charis posed. This slightly elevated vantage point created a dramatic foreshortening effect, enhancing the visual impact of the otherwise minimal composition. In the present image, the distortion caused by the camera angle accentuates Charis’s petite waist and exaggerated rounder hips.
Perhaps owing to its more discreet nature—conservatively showing Charis only from behind, without revealing anatomical details visible in the variant studies—this image was well publicized from the outset. It received nearly a half page illustration in the April 1937 issue of LIFE magazine, which announced Weston’s receipt of a Guggenheim Fellowship and marked him as “the first photographer to receive this great honor generally reserved for artists, writers, and scientists” (p. 76).
Weston included prints of this nude in early exhibitions, including the Morgan Camera Shop in Los Angeles (1939), his landmark retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art (1946), and The World of Edward Weston organized by the Smithsonian Institution (1957).
Early prints of this image—with Weston’s robust full signature—are rare at auction, and it is believed that only two other comparably early prints have been offered in the past three decades.