Miss Thompson Seated in Doorway, Taos, New Mexico

Date1932

Credit LineGift of Sarit Rozycki and Robert Cromwell

Dimensions4 5/8 x 5 7/8 in. (11.8 x 14.9 cm)

Object number2003.068.002

Label TextAs a youth in New York, Strand attended the Ethical Culture School where Louis Hine, the social documentary photographer, taught science and photography. Hine often took his students to Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery to view some of the most progressive art of the day, including photography. There Strand was especially impressed by an exhibition of Hill and Adamson's portraits. He later praised the two men for their "utterly personal control of a machine, the camera." By 1916 Strand's own work was being exhibited by Stieglitz, and he had embraced the principles of "straight photography" in which, as he said, "honesty no less than intensity of vision" could be expressed "without tricks of process or manipulation."

In the early 1930s Strand and his wife Rebecca Salsbury spent their summers working in Taos, New Mexico where there was an artists' colony that included the painters Georgia O'Keeffe and John Marin. Strand turned his camera to the adobe architecture, the ghost towns, and the stark landscape of the American southwest, recording it all with the lucid integrity for which he had become well-known. In the summer of 1932, his last at Taos, Strand made many portraits of his friends, including a series of seventeen of Nancy Thompson as a birthday present for her mother Cornelia. The direct engagement between the girl and the camera and the subtle gradation of tones, enhanced by being printed on platinum paper, are qualities typical of Strand's portraits.
Exhibition HistoryThe Objective Eye: Photographs from the Rozycki-Cromwell Collection, Michael C. Carlos Museum, August 10, 2005 - January 15, 2006
Modern and Contemporary Masters: Highlights from the Works on Paper Collection, Michael C. Carlos Museum, January 24 - May 17, 2009
Published ReferencesMCCM Newsletter, March - May 2004.
MCCM Newsletter, September - November 2005.
Michael C. Carlos Museum: Highlights of the Collections (Atlanta: Michael C. Carlos Museum, 2011), 150-51.

ProvenanceEx coll. Sarit Rozycki and Robert Cromwell, United States.

Status

Not on view

Collections