The New Cornographers
A 70-year-old stranger named Gregory Thorp sent me an email last week. “In Ashfield, I am photographer of corn,” he wrote, “and I have one in particular that might be useful to the Advocate.” This is far from the strangest submission we’ve received, so I asked to see the photo, expecting a bright landscape of some rolling green cornfield somewhere — lovely, but ho-hum.
Instead, he sent me this. It is an arresting slide, made by slicing a stalk of standing corn. An embryonic ear is tucked into the armpit of an outstretched leaf. The silk is visible too, each strand attached to an ovule, there for the shucking.
Thorp works as a commercial photographer, mainly along the Mississippi River, but he has been photographing corn in Ashfield as a labor of love since 1969. The entry point, he says, was “lines and color.” Gradually, he came to examine the botany. An interest in the plant’s architecture led to a curiosity about how the structure biodegrades in the off-season. Because there is no fatty tissue, he explains, “corn is beautiful in breakdown,” and “antiquity in a few weeks.”
Advocate staff have been talking about launching a new series called “Nerding Out,” which would allow us to explore quirky local passion projects. Clearly, Thorp can nerd out about corn photography, and therefore seemed the perfect person to kick off the series. So, I got coffee with him at Elmer’s Store in Ashfield.
When we sat down, he handed me a book of his corn photos. Unlike the color slide, these were outdoor shots. Crisp yellow-brown stalks, abandoned in fallow fields. Close-ups of mottled purple kernels in rows, erupted like rotten teeth in a gumline. Images of unearthed root systems, splayed like the talons and spines of alien creatures. All have been meticulously captured and collected by Thorp, who wanders the fields with his camera in the early morning.
“There seems to be a limitless color palette,” he says, “Under ice, frost … I’m continually knocked out by new forms.”
By the time he’d wrapped up the series I had flipped through, Thorp said, “I was saying to myself: I’m only going to stop walking if I see something I’ve never seen before. So I would just walk and walk and walk before I’d shoot. I had seen so much, and I didn’t want to repeat myself. It really sharpens the eye if you’re only looking for the extraordinary.”
Contact Hunter Styles at hstyles@valleyadvocate.com.
