Meeting House in Shadow, Church, Falmouth, Cape Cod 1933

Dorothy Norman made this photograph of a church in Falmouth, Cape Cod, sometime in the twentieth century, using what looks like gelatin silver. It’s mostly in shadow, which seems like a comment on the way we see or don’t see things around us. When you look closely, you can just make out the texture of the clouds in the sky, like an ocean of dreams. The telephone pole is cropped oddly, it seems to be there to ask about the relationship between the organic and the manmade, between the spiritual and the profane. Norman seems interested in the physicality of the image, the way the light falls and the textures emerge from the dark. There’s a deliberate ambiguity here, which connects her to artists like Georgia O'Keeffe, with whom she worked, both artists were invested in representing reality through an abstracted lens. It's not just about what we see, but how we see it, and what that says about us.