Getty Museum

Ghost Town, Red River, New Mexico

Date

1931

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

Object ID

924e0a9f-28b0-446a-b0e2-f7239ab4f342

Red River, situated at the southern edge of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico, started as a gold mining camp in the 1890s. In just a few years it had grown to the size of a small town, boasting such amenities as saloons, general stores, hotels, a dance hall, and a hospital. By the time Paul Strand visited the town in the early 1930s, the mining boom had long since passed, having left in its wake a sleepy little hamlet, which was now changing into a popular mountain retreat. Strand was interested in the area's natural beauty and the abandoned structures left over from the mining days. In writing to his friend Herbert Seligman (1891-1984) during the summer of 1931, Strand spoke of the false-front buildings in Red River as representing a courage and dignity of a past life. Similar to an approach he had taken in Gaspé, Strand was now continuing to explore the idea of recording a place that was separate from the modern world. Here, working with his versatile Graflex camera, Strand fills the composition with a boarded-up building, the weathered wooden clapboards washed in strong sunlight. The work is reminiscent of Charles Sheeler's studies of barns in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, from 1917 ([88.XM.22.4](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/104EAB), [88.XM.22.1](https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/104EA9)), but Strand goes a step further and removes any contextual information from the scene. He brings everything to the foreground and omits perspectival depth so that the resulting abstract composition appears on one plane, giving the surface of the print a decorative quality. Originally published in _Paul Strand_, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum by Anne M. Lyden (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), 44. ©2005, J. Paul Getty Trust.

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