Paul Strand’s White Fence
I was in Cape Cod this past weekend, and the entire time I couldn’t shake this old, brilliant Paul Strand photograph out of my head…
photo: White Fence, 1916, by Paul Strand.
I was in Cape Cod this past weekend, and the entire time I couldn’t shake this old, brilliant Paul Strand photograph out of my head…
photo: White Fence, 1916, by Paul Strand.
If you treat each side of the photographic frame as a line and find the point on it that expresses the golden ratio, that point (if the smaller portion is below the larger) falls just below the fence rail on the left and just above it on the right. If you draw that as a straight horizontal line across it’s almost precisely a diagonal divider of the elongated rectangle of the fence rail.
I assume this is not cropped. That is an amazing eye. Strand’s photographs have about them a still perfection that is — in the best and most longed for sense — like death. They have the perfection and inevitability and deep quiet that we unconsciously recognize as death. They have the miraculous quality of death as well.
Vince, your mention of feeling death in this Strand photograph is a very apt and sensitive viewing. I could not have said it better myself.
He achieved a terminal point. It haunts. And it continues to leave me in awe.
very good shot, its classic and i loved it =)