In 1953, White moved from San Francisco to Rochester, New York, where he worked at the George Eastman House and then taught at the Rochester Institute of Technology. It took some time for White to adjust to the topography and climate of his new surroundings, but within a few years he had become familiar with the terrain of upstate New York and adopted the area as his own. Among his discoveries were old barns and silos set in agricultural landscapes under wide skies. To play up the contrasts between nature and man-made structures, White experimented with infrared film, which heightened contrasts between the darkened sky and lightened grass and added emphasis to the long shadow of the telephone pole stretching across the foreground.