Getty Museum

[Corn, near Brattleboro, Vermont]

Date

1946

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

In 1943, after ten years of cinema work, Paul Strand returned to still photography full time. Using a five-by-seven-inch Graflex and an eight-by-ten-inch view camera, he commenced creating images mainly in Vermont but very soon began traveling all over New England. In spite of a whole decade dedicated to making motion pictures, Strand easily readjusted to photography. He continued with earlier themes of barns and wooden structures, but his abstract arrangements were now bolder and simpler than anything that had preceded. As can be seen in this image and others ([86.XM.683.12](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/106NR9), [86.XM.683.13](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/106NRB), [86.XM.683.70](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/106NSQ), [86.XM.683.71](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/106NSR), and [86.XM.686.3](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/106NTK)), Strand completely focused on the foreground, removing all contextual information so as to present the viewer here with only two ears of corn hanging from a branch in front of a fence or door; or, elsewhere, only the window of a barn, not the whole barn; only the lichen on a tree, not the whole tree. He succeeded in capturing a tremendous amount of detail, filling the frame with the virtually palpable elements of frosted glass, hewn wood, and rough bark. His concern was to record the very essence of the subject, be it inanimate or a living, growing thing. Strand had his first retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in the spring of 1945. At this time he was working with the historian Nancy Newhall (1908-1974), who was acting curator of photography while her husband, the historian Beaumont Newhall (1908-1993), was fighting in World War II. Together, Strand and Nancy Newhall, who had written the first major monograph on the photographer (to accompany the exhibition), conceived the idea of publishing a book of his prints based only on New England. Adapted from _Paul Strand_, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum by Anne M. Lyden (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), 58. ©2005, J. Paul Getty Trust.

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