"Grazing Horses, Taos, New Mexico, 1930" was taken during the first of three consecutive summers in which Strand visited New Mexico to take portraits of friends and capture the spirit of the Southwest. He and his fellow artists sought to create a specifically American school of photography, celebrating the native and Hispanic cultures found in that region. The pair of horses grazing in the open landscape becomes symbolic of New Mexico’s unfettered natural beauty, which Strand referred to as “some of the last vestiges of what was the frontier in America.”