Getty Museum

[Side Porch]

Date

1946

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

*New England has . . . a special meaning for Americans. The land and its people, their cities and towns, their factories and mills, the villages surrounded by farms, the long coast and the sea whipping against it . . . . But there is something more. . . . For here in this region . . . were born many of the thoughts and actions that have shaped America for more than three hundred years.* So wrote Paul Strand in the foreword to *Time in New England*, a book that combined his photographs of the region with texts by New Englanders. Strand was encouraged to undertake this project in 1945 by Nancy Newhall, then acting curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He spent a number of years looking for "images of nature and architecture and faces of people that were either part of or related in feeling to [New England's] great tradition." This striking composition--an open doorway and an assortment of everyday objects on a porch--was accompanied by the writings of Henry Adams. Describing life in the country, Adams wrote of "the smell of hot pine-woods and sweet fern in the scorching summer noons; of new-mown hay; of ploughed earth; . . . of stables, barns, [and] cow-yards." The rich surface details in this image convey the sensuousness that Strand associated with New England's scenery.

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