In 1999, while photographing the Tuscan landscape, Paula Chamlee stopped to photograph in a ripened field of oats. Originally intending to make at most a couple of photographs, she found herself enthralled by the variety, grace, and rhythm of these grasses. Over the course of little more than an hour, she exposed eight negatives. She thought she would print only some of them, but after looking at the proofs she realized they were all quite lovely. Later, she produced a very limited edition portfolio of this work.

While driving through the gentle rolling hills of the Chianti region, my husband (the photographer Michael A. Smith) and I leisurely wandered while savoring the delights of early summer. Each bend in the road opened to a new vista across a valley or drew us into the intimacy of fragrant woods between fields of crops at various stages of color and ripening. 

Near the town of Strada in Chianti, there were patches of vineyards and olive groves along with fields of wheat and oats ready for harvesting. Unexpectedly, we came upon a field marked by a swirling wind that had played its musical performance upon the tall stems and heads of golden strands of oats. Everything was motionless, yet fully moving.

Stop! I want to photograph here. I mercilessly asked my Italian assistant, Andrea, who suffered terribly from hay fever, to bring the equipment. I promised to show him something new. I worked excitedly and quickly. Would the wind come again and make my exposures impossible? Would the light last? With each new discovery under the dark cloth, I would stop briefly to show Andrea the ground glass, and while rubbing his tearing eyes, he would exclaim, “Wow! It looks so beautiful. I would not have seen this.” 

I made eight negatives in what seemed like a very short time; it was perhaps an hour or two. And I expected that when I got home to the darkroom, I would select about half of those negatives for final printing. Upon making rough proofs of all of them, I laid them out and put them in a sequence. The music of the wind returned, the score of prints was complete at eight.