A woman walks through a wheat field at the end of the day in a wide black hat and a long dark garment of some transparent stuff that shows the body through it. The sky occupies the upper half and is doing a great deal: banked storm cloud, a bright break at the left, the whole of it lit amber. In the immediate foreground the heads of grain are sharp and burning with reflected light, while the figure behind them has moved during the exposure and is soft at the arms and the hem.
The picture was made at the hour when everything turns orange and photographers become unreliable, and it is worth noting how much of the drama is simply the weather being cooperative. The photographer's contribution is placement: the horizon set low, the hat brim breaking the line of cloud, and the foreground grain permitted to intrude far enough forward to make the field a real field rather than a backdrop. Without those stalks the woman would be pasted onto a sunset.
What the photograph does not offer is any account of the situation. There is no path, no destination, nothing carried, no second person, and the walk is neither purposeful nor idle so far as one can tell. It has been arranged that she should cross this field in that dress, and the picture declines to say why — the ordinary condition of such pictures, and generally where they fail. This one survives because the grain in the foreground is describing something the storm cannot, which is the wind.
A woman walks through a wheat field at the end of the day in a wide black hat and a long dark garment of some transparent stuff that shows the body through it. The sky occupies the upper half and is doing a great deal: banked storm cloud, a bright break at the left, the whole of it lit amber. In the immediate foreground the heads of grain are sharp and burning with reflected light, while the figure behind them has moved during the exposure and is soft at the arms and the hem.
The picture was made at the hour when everything turns orange and photographers become unreliable, and it is worth noting how much of the drama is simply the weather being cooperative. The photographer's contribution is placement: the horizon set low, the hat brim breaking the line of cloud, and the foreground grain permitted to intrude far enough forward to make the field a real field rather than a backdrop. Without those stalks the woman would be pasted onto a sunset.
What the photograph does not offer is any account of the situation. There is no path, no destination, nothing carried, no second person, and the walk is neither purposeful nor idle so far as one can tell. It has been arranged that she should cross this field in that dress, and the picture declines to say why — the ordinary condition of such pictures, and generally where they fail. This one survives because the grain in the foreground is describing something the storm cannot, which is the wind.