Wheatfield, France 1950

Paul Strand made this photographic print of a wheatfield in France, capturing a landscape that feels both vast and intimate. When I look at this, I think about his framing of the rows of haystacks and the trees, like he's trying to find a visual language for the rhythms and patterns of nature. The print is small, and the greyscale flattens the depth, yet within that limitation it gives an intense visuality and spatial compression. It's like he’s in conversation with the cubists, who were also trying to flatten space. The way the light hits the wheat, those soft tonal shifts – you can tell Strand was thinking hard about composition, about light and shadow. There’s a kind of rigor there. I think about the legacy of photography, about artists like Alfred Stieglitz, who was so important for Strand early on, and how each photographer builds on what came before, trying to see the world in their own way. There is real beauty to the way he made this image, of course. But there is also something very moving in the idea of the exchange between artists that spans so long.