Landscape with Frame Buildings, Gaspé

Paul Strand

1929

Gelatin silver print

J. Paul Getty Museum

A collection of wooden buildings, including a larger white house, are situated on a grassy slope under a dark, cloudy sky. A wooden fence runs across the middle ground. In this view of Gaspé there is not the grand sense of perspective or vastness of space found in The Beach—Percé, Gaspé, Quebec (84.XP.208.233), but there is the same attention to the internal arrangement of the image and the interaction of key elements through the exploitation of line, shape, and mass as they are translated into black-and-white forms. Strand is approaching his photography as Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) did his painting: the structure of the composition and the organization of elements within that composition define the subject. Indeed, this print recalls Cézanne's painting Houses in Provence ( https://www.nga.gov/colle