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| Lucien Aigner Bastille Day 1937 gelatin silver print Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| Henri Cartier-Bresson Coronation of King George VI, London 1937 gelatin silver print Princeton University Art Museum |
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| Cecil Beaton The Duke and Duchess of Windsor at Château de Cande 1937 gelatin silver print Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Acme Newspictures Hindenburg Crash 1937 gelatin silver print Princeton University Art Museum |
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| Léonard Misonne Le Chemin Creux 1937 mediobrome print Minneapolis Institute of Art |
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| Berenice Abbott Jacob Heymann Butcher Shop, 345 Sixth Avenue, Manhattan 1938 gelatin silver print Minneapolis Institute of Art |
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| Walker Evans Subway Portrait ca. 1938 gelatin silver print Cleveland Museum of Art |
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| György Kepes Juliet's Shadow Caged 1938 gelatin silver print Princeton University Art Museum |
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| Nathan Lerner Cakes in the Window 1938 gelatin silver print Milwaukee Art Museum |
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| Peter Sekaer The Youngest of the Parkinson Children ca. 1938 gelatin silver print Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri |
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| Ben Shahn Street Scene in Columbus, Ohio 1938 gelatin silver print Cleveland Museum of Art |
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| James van der Zee The Heiress, Harlem 1938 gelatin silver print Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Lionel Wendt Torso and Statue ca. 1939 gelatin silver print Minneapolis Institute of Art |
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| Margaret Bourke-White Coils of Aluminum Wire 1939 gelatin silver print Princeton University Art Museum |
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| Louise Dahl-Wolfe Liz Gibbons with Camera (fashion shot for Harper's Bazaar) 1938 gelatin silver print Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| Louise Dahl-Wolfe Night Bathers 1939 gelatin silver print Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri |
from Theory of Vision
Come, child, and with your sunbeam gaze assign
Green to the garden as a metaphor
For contemplation, seeking to declare
Whether by green you specify the green
Of orchard sunlight, blossom, bark, or leaf,
Or green of an imaginary life.
A mosaic of all possible greens becomes
A premise in your eye, whereby the limes
Are green as limes faintly by midnight known,
As foliage in a thunderstorm, as dreams
Of fruit in barren countries; claims
The orchard as a metaphor of green.
Aware of change as no barometer
You may determine climates at your will;
Spectrums of feeling are accessible
If orchards in the mind will persevere
On their hillsides original with joy.
Enter the orchard differently today:
When here you bring your earliest tragedy,
Your goldfish, upside-down and rigidly
Floating on weeds in the aquarium,
Green is no panorama for your grief
Whose raindrop smile, dissolving and aloof,
Ordains an unusual brightness as you come:
The brightness of a change outside the eye,
A question on the brim of what may be,
Attended by a new, impersonal green.
The goldfish dead where limes hang yellowing
Is metaphor for more incredible things,
Things you shall live among, things seen, things known.
– James Merrill (1946)