How much sky does a plowed field deserve? This picture answers with extravagance: two-thirds of the frame given to a pink-grey overcast, and what little remains to wet furrows that hold the same light in standing water. The trade is fair. The sky pays for its space by dropping its pallor into every rut, so that the mud, which ought to be the dullest matter photography can find, glimmers row by row like something freshly minted and not yet spent.
The organization is plain and exact. The furrows run cross-frame in the foreground, then bend and gather toward the horizon; a ridge of turned clods runs out on a long diagonal, the one firm line in a soft country. Utility poles stand along the horizon at intervals a surveyor would approve, each smaller and paler than the last, until the farthest is a pencil mark in the haze. Nothing here counts as an event. The picture is built instead on measurements: wet against dry, near texture against far tone, the brown half against the rose half.
The photographer is best known for suburban houses lit from within at night, but his daylight belongs to fields like this one, numbered rather than named: 1609-b. Prints of his work are held by SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney. In archival pigment the mud keeps its gleam and the sky its faint warmth; a lesser print would let this picture go grey, and greyness is precisely what it is about, and not at all what it is.
How much sky does a plowed field deserve? This picture answers with extravagance: two-thirds of the frame given to a pink-grey overcast, and what little remains to wet furrows that hold the same light in standing water. The trade is fair. The sky pays for its space by dropping its pallor into every rut, so that the mud, which ought to be the dullest matter photography can find, glimmers row by row like something freshly minted and not yet spent.
The organization is plain and exact. The furrows run cross-frame in the foreground, then bend and gather toward the horizon; a ridge of turned clods runs out on a long diagonal, the one firm line in a soft country. Utility poles stand along the horizon at intervals a surveyor would approve, each smaller and paler than the last, until the farthest is a pencil mark in the haze. Nothing here counts as an event. The picture is built instead on measurements: wet against dry, near texture against far tone, the brown half against the rose half.
The photographer is best known for suburban houses lit from within at night, but his daylight belongs to fields like this one, numbered rather than named: 1609-b. Prints of his work are held by SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney. In archival pigment the mud keeps its gleam and the sky its faint warmth; a lesser print would let this picture go grey, and greyness is precisely what it is about, and not at all what it is.