Front Room Reflected in Mirror
1947
Image not available — this artwork is under copyright
View on museum website →Medium
gelatin silver print
Dimensions
image: 24 × 18.9 cm (9 7/16 × 7 7/16 in.) sheet: 25.4 × 20.32 cm (10 × 8 in.)
Classification
Photograph
Department
CPH
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase with the aid of funds from the Polaroid Corporation)
Accession Number
2015.19.4320
Art Historical Context
**Front Room Reflected Mirror** (1947) is a captivating gelatin silver print by Wright Morris, a pioneering American photographer and novelist renowned for his intimate portrayals of Midwestern life. Captured in the post-World War II era, this 9 7/16 × 7 7/16-inch image masterfully uses a mirror's reflection to layer domestic space, inviting viewers into a front room frozen in quiet nostalgia. Morris, who often documented rural Nebraska farmhouses and small-town vernacular, employs the gelatin silver process—a staple of mid-20th-century black-and-white photography—for its rich tonal range and ...
About the Artist
Wright Morris
Wright Morris (1910–1998) was a pioneering American photographer whose spare, evocative images captured the textures of rural life on the Great Plains, often paired innovatively with his own prose. Born in Central City, Nebraska, on January 6, 1910, Morris lost his mother, Grace Osborn Morris, just days after his birth; his father, a Union Pacific Railroad worker, remarried Gertrude, and the famil...