White Fence, Port Kent, New York. (1915). Platinum Print.
Though it feels like serendipity, “Paul Strand: Master of Modern Photography” was five years in the making. In 2009 the opportunity arose for the Philadelphia Museum of Art to acquire 3,000 prints from the Paul Strand Archive at Aperture, making it the world’s largest and most comprehensive repository of the artist’s work. In 2010 the museum began cataloging Strand’s prints. From what is now a collection of over 4,000 works, the museum’s Brodsky Curator of Photography, Peter Barberie, has culled 250 for this critical reassessment of the artist’s evolution, and the result is worth the wait.
As a key figure in modernist photography, Strand is best known for his work from the early 1920’s. Yet in a career that spanned seven decades, he breezed through pictorialism, osmosed Cubism, fused abstraction and social documentation, printed books, made motion pictures, and often cannibalized his own earlier ideas and images in portraits of life across the globe. In projects he often referred to as “experiments” the inquiry of each informs the next. As the PMA’s show unfolds, it is staggering to consider how one artist could coherently navigate so many terrains, while allowing humanism to remain the driving force and connection betweeen sometimes disparate methods.
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Strand mythologized his career as one of life’s accidents. Born in NYC in 1890 to first generation Americans of German-Jewish descent, he recounts that his father gave him his first camera, a Kodak Brownie, in 1902. From 1904 to 1908 he attended the Ethical Culture School in Manhattan, where the photographer Lewis Hine was assistant professor of biology and teacher of an extracurricular course in photography. Hine was not yet famous for his documentary photos of Ellis Island immigrants and child laborers, but he did introduce his students to Alfred Stieglitz and the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue, later known simply as “291.” This was, in Strand’s words, a “decisive day.” Less than a decade later, Strand had his first solo show, Photographs of New York and Other Places at 291.
The Armory Show of 1913 marked the migration of Modernism to America, and Steiglitz and his group were concurrently campaigning for the recognition of photography as a legitimate art form. Among Strand’s photos from his 291 show is River Neckar, Germany (1911), a vertical framing of the telescoping river with barren trees in the foreground that aligns more with the soft-focus style of the pictorialists, the early fine art photographers whose techniques imitated painting. But it marked a turning point for Strand.
By this time, he had abandoned what he alluded to as “Whistlering with a soft-focus lens.” Wall Street (1915), is a somber portrait of the city in morning light that marks a shift to the urban landscape. Here Strand sought to organize movement in a way that was abstract and yet “controlled.” A crowd of miniature men and women move along the bottom of the horizontal frame, figures casting elongated shadows onto the pavement and against the monolithic columns and shadows of the Morgan Trust building.
Wall Street, New York (1915). Platinum Print.
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The exhibition continues chronologically, documenting the further evolution of Strand’s photographic style. White Fence, Port Kent, New York (1916), perhaps one of his most famous images, is a pivotal moment exemplifiying his brief foray into abstraction: the familiar shapes of a farmhouse, barn, and white fence flatten out and dominate the composition. Abstraction Bowls, Twin Lakes, Connecticut (1916) is a close-up of quotidian objects during Strand’s foray into Cubism. In an adjacent gallery, five emotional studies of Strand’s first wife, Rebecca, made over course of two years, are juxtaposed with elegantly composed photographs of his movie camera. Akeley Motion Picture Camera, New York (1923), is an homage to his trade and the hard muscular language of precision. Using the new medium of film, Strand revisited his depictions of the urban movement in Manhatta (1920), a short silent film inspired by Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, depicting a day in lower Manhattan. The gallery runs continuous loops of this film and excerpts from two of his others, Redes and Native Land.
In a 1923 essay, The Art Motive in Photography, Strand identifies the photograph as an organism with a life of its own that could hang beside a Durer, a Rubens, or a Corot without “falling to pieces.” His valuation is not based on beauty or artistic appearance but on something intrinsic, which he called “livingness.” As Peter Barbarie identifies in the catalogue essay, “For Strand realism could be woven out of fact or fiction, or both, but it had to say something tangible about the world. It left little room for cool detachment.” Eventually, Strand fcame to find Steiglitz’s work to be remote, and, by the end of the 1920’s, Strand had split from the 291 group and his marriage to Rebecca had ended. In the 1930’s he traveled to Mexico at the invitation of the Mexican composer Carlos Chávez. An exploration of leftist politics marked this next chapter of Strand’s work, which included realist filmmaking and the eventual founding of Frontier Films, Strand’s own film company.
Intellectually, Strand was fascinated by the ways in which time and history had shaped the people and places he photographed. He sought to show what was modern, vital, and present, and never ceased to question what the mechanical medium of photography could contribute as an art form. From Mexico, Strand wrote to a friend, Ted Stevenson,
“It is a tough problem we are up against, those of us who can no longer live in ivory towers of one sort or another . . . . I have come to the point where I believe that any young artist who is not aware of the human struggle—economic and political—which overshadows . . . every part of the world today—is strangely outside the main currents of life—yet to be an artist within those currents—well that is the new esthetic problem.”
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Time in New England was Strand’s collaboration with Nancy Newhall on the first of his six books, and his attempt to reorient his work towards the traditional American subjects with which he had begun. Here, Strand assembled a lexicon of ordinary but quintessentially American objects that become what the exhibition curator Amanda Bock calls in her catalogue essay “the visual equivalents of democratic struggle,” conveying the labor of America’s founding without resorting to clichéd images. Just as the book was published in 1950, however, Strand moved to France. The goal of this move was to photograph a single village, but what resulted was a portrait series of French life.
In the following decades, Strand also documented life in Ghana and Egypt. But it was with his book Un Paese: Portrait of an Italian Village, published in 1955, that Strand at last achieved his goal of portraying a single community. In the early 1950s he focused on Luzzara in the Po River Valley, an area still recovering from WWII. Valentino Lusetti, Strand’s guide and translator, arranged to have his mother and five brothers to pose for The Family, Luzzara, Italy (The Lusettis) (1953). With two figures framed in a dark opening and more sitting and standing in front of a house, the image invokes a neorealist aesthetic and is as modern as any photograph today.
The Family, Luzzara (The Lusettis), 1953 (negative); Mid-late 1960s (print). Gelatin silver print.
Although his works were neither radical nor revolutionary, Strand, facing increased scrutiny for his political views, chose voluntary exile in France. Though he returned to the United States for short visits, he maintained residence in France from 1951 until his death in 1976.
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The show closes with a series of photographs taken during Strand’s last years, which he spent in Orgeval, outside of Paris—depictions of domestic life, primarily the gardens around his house. The artist who made art out of other people’s everyday subjects, in the end turned his camera on his own everyday life—his gardens and near surroundings. The PMA’s retrospective cuts a wide swath, but the aggregate is intimate.
“Paul Strand: Master of Modern Photography” is on view in the Dorrance Galleries at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. from Oct. 21 through Jan. 4, 2015.