DeCordova Collects Photographs: Recent Acquisitions
Willard Traub
Whether photographing in sites around the world or in his own garden, Willard Traub approaches his subjects with an eye for the formal relationships of line, color, tone, and texture. His subjects have included rural and urban scenes, cemetery sculpture, the built environment, scenes of Paris, the seashore, and gardens. Always intrigued by the facades of buildings, empty and uninhabited spaces, and abstractions of nature, in the mid-1980s Traub turned his camera to his garden in Lincoln (where he lived at the time), and completed a series of photographs of beans growing against a wire fence. Because Traub photographs the beans at such close proximity, often against a backgrounds that he provided to isolate the image, they can be read as sculptural, abstract shapes, whose curve and texture and vines contrast effectively with the grid of the wire fence. Traub’s photographs of beans exist on two levels, as documents of the various stages of growth and decay of the vegetable, and as powerful graphic patterns that contrast dark and light, shadow and form, and nature and man-made structures. In 1986, Traub was awarded a Massachusetts Artists Fellowship in Photography for his series of photographs of beans.
