Harrowing a 2,000 acre wheat field which is allowed to fallow alternate years. Antelope Valley, Los Angeles County, California  1937

Dorothea Lange captured this stark image of California farmland with her camera, sometime in the mid twentieth century. It’s so gray it almost feels drained of color, yet there’s a stark, textured beauty to the scene. The land itself is a character here. Look at the way the furrows and upturned clods of earth create this incredible tactile surface. You can almost feel the dryness, the grit. And then there’s that machine – the tractor – and the figures beside it, tiny against the vastness. This area where the workers meet the land is really the heart of the piece. It reminds me a little of some of those early minimalist landscapes – Agnes Martin, maybe – in the way it reduces everything to these essential, almost abstract forms. The horizon line, the flat sky, the repetitive patterns of the field, it all adds up to a powerful statement about humans and their relationship to the land. It’s a conversation, a kind of dance between people, nature, and machine.