Church Gateway, Hidalgo, Mexico

For this image, Paul Strand focused on a stone gateway leading to a church courtyard. Rising to the top of the picture, the gateway appears weighty and monumental while sunlight falling on the inside of the arch leads the viewer’s eye into the courtyard. Strand began his career in New York City, engaging with its energetic street life and ever-changing skyline. Yet, he gravitated to the Southwest and further into Mexico in the 1930s. He was attracted to earlier Indigenous and Spanish colonial building types as much for their elements of shape and massing as for their organic sense of rootedness, absent in the modern city. Throughout his career, Strand favored the platinum printing process, which was revered for its richness—here revealing a wealth of detail in the shadowed areas.