Hacienda, near Taos, New Mexico 1930

Paul Strand made this photograph, "Hacienda, near Taos, New Mexico," with gelatin silver. What I see is a patient study in light and texture, and a kind of quiet abstraction. Look at the way the water stains drip down the wall, like accidental brushstrokes. It reminds me of Cy Twombly, if he were a building! The way Strand has captured the peeling surface, the rough-hewn logs, it’s all about the materiality. The muted tones give it a timeless quality, a sense of age and history. The window is like a painting within a painting, a flat plane of geometric abstraction sitting on the surface of the weathered wall. And then those vertical logs cutting through the space! He’s pushing and pulling the composition, creating a tension between the two and three dimensional, something that artists like Jasper Johns were dealing with around the same time. It shows that photography can embrace the same ambiguities and layered meanings as painting.