The ten photographs in this portfolio are contact prints from 11x14-inch negatives, the largest format Brett Weston ever used, and the largest practical format for any but the most ardent devotee of view cameras and contact prints. Brett employed this camera between 1944 and the early 1960s, when he realised that new medium-format roll-film cameras like the Rollei SL66 (which made relatively small 2 1/4-inch square negatives), were so good that he could abandon contact prints altogether. By 1963, Weston felt confident that he had enough 11x14 prints to select ten pictures that fit his criteria for a portfolio-quality, variety, unity, and ease of printing-and since he did not use the 11x14 camera after this time, he may have intended this portfolio as a farewell to the big camera itself. Like his previous portfolios, this selection is neutral, and the portfolio has no text or predetermined order. As a group, these pictures are quieter, more relaxed, and somewhat less shocking or abstract than his previous portfolios, perhaps because of the limitations of the camera.

This is a selection of photographs taken from 1929 to 1942.

This is the first portfolio in the series not tangibly "located" in place or time as is San Francisco, White Sands, and New York; rather, it is, in effect, a retrospective exhibition because Weston selected the photographs from his entire oeuvre going back to 1934, when he was just twenty-three. The fifteen pictures include macrocosmic landscapes with recognisable deep space and horizons, microcosmic landscapes, or "elegant bits" of nature, as Brett was fond of calling them, and man-made subjects that are usually close-ups. This portfolio also contains a number of renditions of virtually flat subjects that can rightly be called abstractions.

The New York portfolio was produced by Weston in 1951. It contains Weston's photographs of New York from the 1940s -- photographs that contrast with his photographs of San Francisco and evidence Weston's growth as a photographer. The original 1951 title page and the introduction by Beaumont Newhall are reproduced in facsimile. Included is an afterword by art historian Roger Aikin.

Between 1939 and 1980 Brett Weston produced sixteen limited edition portfolios of original photographs. He believed passionately in the power of his original prints and chose the portfolio as the way to reach an expanded audience while still maintaining control over image quality. Today, Westons original portfolios are rare, expensive, and relatively inaccessible in museums, archives, libraries, or private collections. Most of the photographs in these new books have never before been reproduced. To recreate the feeling of the original portfolios, great care has been taken not only with the reproduction of the photographs, but with every aspect of these books. Where there is text in the portfolios, it is reproduced in facsimile, and the colour of each books cover has been selected to match the covers of the original portfolio cases.

In 1975 Brett Weston was sixty-four years old and had been taking photographs for fifty years. He had married and divorced for the fourth and last time, his daughter Erica was grown, and he had achieved international recognition and considerable financial security. Oregon photographers are well aware of the great diversity and visual possibilities in their native landscape. Weston fell in love with Oregon in the late 1960s and made several close friends there, especially Gerald Robinson, who wrote the introduction for Weston's Europe portfolio of 1973 and to whom this portfolio is dedicated, and Bernard Freemesser, who wrote the introduction for his Oregon portfolio. "The Oregon" portfolio exemplifies Brett Weston's unique vision at the height of his powers. His subjects are familiar - water, ice, metal, rocks, sand and trees - but their treatment is mysterious, unexpected, free, and joyful.