This is one of the photographs that Struss took that summer 1910 in Nova Scotia, an image of his sister Hilda, who was a primary school teacher in Manhattan. She looks at the photographer as she walks towards him in the sunlight, too distant, it seems to read the expression on her face, though her casual, unposed posture gives the image a snapshot immediacy. This simple composition represents a pleasing balance of form, tone and pattern. Struss built up the image in component flat forms arranged in a manner that draws the viewer in, following Clarence White's advice to simplify composition and fill the pictorial space. The high, arching horizon, which narrows at the upper right, draws the eye up and into the distance. The shaded foreground passage shows that the photographer stood in the shade of a leafy tree and pointed his camera toward the setting sun. A soft light filters through the leaves, and a tree in the middle ground casts a long shadow. The figure of Hilda Struss appears higher and parallel with the sun. She casts a delicate, narrow shadow and seems almost to melt into insubstantiality amid light and space. The photographer captured this image with a 4 x 5 camera, using a long lens to obtain a wider-angle view. Struss used a 12-inch-focal-length lens, which enabled him to compose in the camera but also tended to flatten the depth of field, achieving a measure of reductive abstraction. He drew upon the ideas of Max Weber, who advised that photography was a two-dimensional art, dependent upon fundamental principles of composition, and reliant upon the selection of forms rather than their creation.

from Acton, A History of Photography at the University of Notre Dame: Twentieth Century (Notre Dame, 2019)