High contrast, from a perfectionist

The first meaning refers to family and reputation. Brett Weston (1911-93) was the son of Edward Weston, one of the great photographers of the 20th century. The younger Weston was very good, but not that good.

As the high caliber of the early work in this exhibition at the Currier Museum of Art shows, Weston was a photographic prodigy. “He is doing better work at fourteen than I did at thirty,’’ his father noted. That’s true, and it was true, at least in part, because he had his father’s example before him. Father and son overlapped in both subject matter (plant studies, rocks, dunes) and several key locales: Oceano and Point Lobos, both in California. One reason for that overlap was practical. It was Weston, serving as driver, who introduced his father to those locations.

A picture like “Dune, Oceano,’’ from 1934, with its curving overlay of darkness upon sand, indicates the other significance of shadow in the title. It’s quite literal. All photographers love light. They have to. It’s how they make their living. Weston also loved light’s absence. His blacks have a unique force. Contrast wasn’t so much a technical device he employed as a defining principle of his art. For him, shadow wasn’t just light absent but light negated.

A predilection for high contrast is there from the beginning. “Magnolia Bud,’’ from 1927, is dazzling and perfect. It’s hard to conceive of the opposition between black and white being employed to more ravishing effect. None of Robert Mapplethorpe’s flower studies from half a century later can outdo it in voluptuary classicism. Not that contrast was just something Weston contrived in a studio. “Broken Window, San Francisco,’’ from 1937, displays a jet-black jaggedness that’s like a cross between an inkblot and one of Robert Motherwell’s “Elegies to the Spanish Republic.’’

Weston’s fine eye is evident throughout the show. So, too, is something far rarer among photographers: a fine hand. His prints are uniformly pristine, almost shockingly so. Sports fans speak of “rink rats’’ and “gym rats,’’ players who haunt the ice or court and won’t go home until they’re forced to. Weston was a darkroom rat. What for most photographers is, at best, a necessary evil, if not downright tedious, was for him deeply gratifying and central to his art.

There have been other photographers for whom printing was a work in progress. Bill Brandt, for one, could never leave his prints alone. Yet for him the darkroom was a place of experimentation; he was like an etcher or engraver working through various states of a plate. There was no final answer to the question, “How should prints of this negative look?’’ Weston was different. He had an ideal he sought, and which often he seemingly attained. Then, once attained, the print was set. A perfectionist, Weston knew that it was the darkroom, rather than the camera, that could provide him with the perfection he sought. (The camera, which records external reality, is inevitably contingent. The darkroom, which produces an artifact, is inherently directive.)

There’s an impeccable logic to Weston’s having destroyed his negatives before his death. A photographic image is always a balance between form and content. For Weston, the form - his specific rendering of the content - was so determining that the idea of one of his pictures being printed by someone else was a contradiction in terms. It would then no longer be his. That might sound like artistic self-aggrandizement or egotism. Instead, it was a simple recognition of fact.

Weston’s not really a nature photographer, this despite the fact he took so many of these pictures in the wild. “Wild’’ is the wrong word, actually. There’s nothing uncontrolled here. His pictures can be almost jewel-like in their meticulousness. Nature provided Weston with so many of his subjects and settings, but little of his inspiration. That came from the darkroom. Rarely has an artist so thoroughly belonged to, or sprung from, his medium.

Texture was not to Weston’s taste - pattern was. In that respect, he differed markedly from his father. One can all but feel the scratch of the granules against Charis Wilson’s bare flesh in “Nude on Sand.’’ For Brett Weston, a dune was a whole rather than the sum of its parts. It was a form of sculpture. So, too, was a set of steps or an airplane fuselage. The play of angles in “Stairway, San Francisco,’’ for example, from 1928, displays an assertive, even playful geometry, as do the aluminum ribs in “Ford Trimotor Plane,’’ taken seven years later.

There’s something slightly inhuman about Weston’s work. A precision as exacting as his can feel chilly. There are more than 100 photographs in the Currier show, and hardly a person to be seen in them. It makes absolute sense that so many of these pictures were taken in the desert or along the shoreline. Again and again, Weston presents an evacuated - or is it prelapsarian? - world.

Seeing the three fingers in the foreground of “Hand and Ear (Ramiel McGehee)’’ is a shock. The ear could be explained away as some kind of interesting shape, but those digits definitely announce the presence of an actual human, which can seem as anomalous here as rigid kelp or a treeless forest. By the same token, it’s not easy to take a picture of 42d Street, in Manhattan, during the daytime in such a way that no people are visible. Weston managed to do it.

In the final decade or two of his life, there’s a strong sense of Weston’s working almost wholly for himself, creating - maybe it’s more accurate to say deepening or enlarging - a vision of a private world. It’s like a distillation of the work that preceded it: increasingly hermetic but never mannered. The rather self-conscious artiness of his “Underwater Nudes’’ series (there are three images from it in the show) underscores how rarely his work seems affected. That is no small thing for an artist who’s such a thoroughgoing formalist. Weston clearly felt the pull of abstraction. But even when he gave himself up to it - as in his studies of mud cracks, broken glass, and reflections - the work remained tethered to a sense of external reality. The brilliant clarity of his printing insured that. The affinity between Weston’s work and that of, say, Minor White and Paul Caponigro is patent, but without any of their grandiosity or spiritual baggage.

At its best, Weston’s work exalted reality without ever seeking to transcend it. “Glen Canyon, Tree and Rock Wall,’’ from 1959, extracts from the solidity of wood and stone a nearly miraculous duality of delicacy, contrasting the dark tracery of the branches and near-radiant tracery of water scorings in the rock. “Holland Canal,’’ taken on a European trip in 1971, could be a demonstration of the photographer Robert Adams’s statement of the condition the medium aspires to: “a tension so exact it is peace.’’

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.