“The decision as to when to photograph, the actual click of the shutter, is partly controlled by the outside, by the flow of life, but it also comes from the mind and heart of the artist. The photograph is his vision of the world and expresses, however subtly, his values and convictions.”
Paul Strand, 1976, Introduction to The Garden portfolio; published subsequently as The Garden at Orgeval (2012) Strand, P. and Meyerowitz, J., New York: Aperture
Strand was a photographer of ‘values and convictions’ and despite being accused of being un-American, he has also been called “the biggest, widest, most commanding talent in the history of American photography“.
In many ways, Strand has become the hero of my current project, not so much stylistically or formally but because of the way he persevered in picturing the ‘meaningness’ he found in the world throughout his life and career.
Strand was born in New York on October 16th 1890. His grandparents had emigrated to the US from Bohemia some fifty years previously. Fearing that he might be drawn into the delinquency of some of his peers in the local school, his parents enrolled him, at considerable financial sacrifice, in the private Ethical Cultural School, a progressive high school, where he attended extracurricular photographic classes taught by one of the School’s science teachers, the sociologist and photographer, Lewis Hine.
In 1907, on a field trip with Hine, he visited Alfred Stieglitz’ Little Galleries of the Photo- Secession, later known as the 291 Gallery after its location in three little rooms at 291 Fifth Avenue, and began what was, at times, a difficult but important friendship with Stieglitz and his wife, Georgia O’Keefe.
Stieglitz had opened his gallery in 1905 specifically to exhibit ‘the very best that has been accomplished in pictorial photography throughout the world’ (Stieglitz, 1905). Pictorialism, a movement that had developed since the 1870s in contradistinction to the realist, documentarian mode of early photography, contended that photography could also work through symbol and allegory and so equate to high art where the vision of the photographer, as well as their technical skill, took primacy over what was in front of the lens.
However, by 1907, when he first encountered Strand, Stieglitz was already moving away from pictorialism towards what would be called ‘straight photography’, a term introduced in 1904 by an article in the American Amateur Photographer by Sadakichi Hartmann (Hartmann, 1904). ‘Straight photography’ returned to the distinctive qualities of the camera as a machine, eschewing any manipulation of the image and acknowledging the sharp focus and detail that only the camera could produce. Stieglitz’ advice to Strand was in the direction of ‘straight photography’.
After graduating from the Ethical School, Strand worked in the family’s importing firm for a couple of years and then at an insurance office – which he loathed. With the support of his father and after a 6 weeks trip to Europe, he set up as a photographer in 1911. Most of his rather infrequent commercial work was portraiture but in his own time, under the influence of modernist abstraction, particularly cubism, he experimented with line and form, producing two of his most well known, early images.
Wall Street, NY (1915) was one of 6 images that Strand produced in 1915-1916 to be published in Stieglitz’ journal Camera Work (No. 48) and which would launch his career.
The image does not appear formally composed as it captures a single moment in the endless business of everyday life in the city. The monumentalism of the building and its symbolic location on Wall Street, dwarfs the small figures walking uphill, drawing long shadows behind them. Combining realism and abstraction in a single frame, the image could be an archetype for the experience of modernity for the common man.
His White Fence, Port Kent, New York (1916), taken while Strand was on holiday, in its simple arrangement of overlapping planes, abstracts and condenses the idea and the fenced off reality of the all-American home.
Strand remained fascinated by the city however and over the next few years set out to capture “portraits of people the way you see them in New York parks, sitting around not conscious of being photographed” (Tomkins 1976, p. 189). Taken covertly and published in Camera Work, these images are striking memorials to people on the margins of society, a motif that would characterise Strand’s work:
Strand was drafted in 1918 and spent 18 months as a medical orderly where he was introduced to x-ray and other forms of medical cameras and where he considered the possibility of making films of surgical operations to show to medical students.
On his return to civilian life, he tried his hand at advertising photography but with little success. His interest in the moving image was growing and he collaborated with Charles Sheeler, the painter, in the making of a short documentary film on Manhattan which showed for a week in a Broadway movie theatre and is regarded by some as America’s first avant-garde film. Strand however was struggling to make a living.
In 1920, he began work for a company making medical films but in 1922, the year he married Rebecca Salisbury, the company went out of business. This left Strand in possession of a technically sophisticated movie camera, bought with the proceeds of a small inheritance. For the next 10 years, Strand made his living as a movie cameraman, including occasionally shooting action sequences for Hollywood films.
His still photography was confined, in the main, to explorations of his holiday landscapes in Maine, Canada and New Mexico, including close ups of natural details:
There is a stillness, a balance and the calmness of precision to Strand’s landscapes:
During his vacations in New Mexico, Strand consciously played with the themes of time and place, visiting ghost towns, old churches and abandoned house, sometimes set against dramatic skies:
By 1932, Strand’s marriage was failing and Rebecca returned to New York while Strand stayed in New Mexico for the next two years. At this point his relationship with Stieglitz also began to weaken, ostensibly over a show by Paul and Rebecca but also, in Strand’s words,
“I’m a politically conscious person … I’ve always wanted to use photography as an instrument of research into and reporting the life of my own time. It was inevitable for us to come to some parting of the ways.”
(Quoted in Tomkins, 1976, p. 25)
In 1931, while holidaying in New Mexico, Strand had made friends with the Mexican composer Carlos Chavez. Chavez arranged for a two week exhibition of Strand’s work in a Ministry of Education building in Mexico City. Chavez also arranged for him to work on a report into art education in rural schools. His candid, anonymous (and covert) portraits catch their subjects in quiet moments, relaxed and at one with their time and place; dignified and often beautiful:
Strand’s friendship with Chavez, a leading cultural figure in Mexico, led also to him being commissioned to make a series of films about the conditions of Mexican workers. In fact, only one film was to emerge from the project; Redes (“Nets” – although the film was titled ‘The Wave’ in English). The film, part documentary, part drama told the story of a strike undertaken by a group of exploited fishermen.
With the premature ending of the film project, Strand returned to New York in 1934 where he became involved with the left wing theatre, becoming a member of the advisory board of the Group Theatre. In 1935, after a two month visit to Moscow looking at Soviet theatre and meeting Eisenstein, Strand was invited to make a film of the American ‘dust bowl’ (‘The Plow that Broke the Plains’) and film making became Strand’s full-time occupation.
From 1937 to 1942, Strand was President of Frontier Films, a non profit production company that had developed out of the New York Photo League, making documentary films with a strong progressive purpose:
“We were very concerned about what was going on in the world. We were very concerned about the Spanish Civil War. Someone in the government once called people like us ‘premature anti-fascists …”
(Quoted in Tomkins, 1976, p. 28)
In 1942, at the launch of Strand’s ‘Native Land’, a film about civil rights violations and the exploitative farming practices that caused the dust bowl, narrated by Paul Robeson, Strand said with undiminished urgency,
“Native Land represents the culmination of a ten-year effort to bring to the American screen a kind of reality which dramatises the real problems, hopes and aspirations of real people in America and elsewhere … This is the fundamental meaning Native Lands is meant to have, the meaning whereby the past events it pictures attach to the present moment, and the task of wiping Fascism forever from the face of the earth.”
(Quoted in Tomkins, 1976, p. 161
This was to be Strand’s last ever film and, at the age of 53, he returned to stills photography.
The sense of place had always been key to Strand’s work and over the next few years, he took photographs in New England as part of a collaboration with MOMA photography curator, Nancy Newhall. In 1944, Strands’s images were exhibited as the first one-man photography show to be held at MOMA and a book, ‘Time in New England’ was published in 1945.
Strand’s inheritance from his father now allowed him to work solely on his own projects. The New England project had rekindled his interest in travel photography and he formed the idea of a book about a single village. By this time however he had deep concerns about undertaking such a project in America. Some of his colleagues from Frontier Films had been included in the Hollywood Blacklist, following the First Red Scare and the spread of McCarthyism and, in 1950, Strand left America for Europe and first, for Paris. He, and his third wife Hazel Kingsbury, travelled throughout France, publishing Le France de Profil in 1950.
Young Boy, Gondeville, Charente, France, 1951 is perhaps Strand’s most well known image. There something in the boy’s look that is almost Blakean in its troubling intensity. The image has an added poignancy when in 1995, the journalist Michel Boujut, discovered that the unnamed boy was then a 63 year old retired locksmith, with 5 daughters who lived near Paris. Such is the fate of youth.
In the following year, Strand found the village he had been looking for, Luzzara, in the Po valley, northern Italy and published Un Paese in 1952. Possibly the first significant book of photography published in Italy, this photograph of the Lusetti family is a defining image:
In the text that accompanies the image, we discover that this is a portrait of Anna Lusetti and 5 of her 8 sons, all of whom had fought in the Second World War, 3 others having died in infancy. The father, Valentino, was a communist partisan who had been beaten up by fascists before his death in action. It is a picture of family strength and survival, tied to a specific place and time but, as with several of the figures, one is drawn to look outside of the frame to understand also a present sense of loss.
As in Un Paese, Strand increasingly used text to extend the meaning of his images, usually in collaboration. Much of the remainder of his output takes this form and arises from his travels to Morocco, the Outer Hebrides, Egypt, Ghana and Rumania. His themes remain the quiet dignity, strength and resilience of ordinary people living their lives in very definite and distinct but widely differing cultural and economic contexts. The setting for Strand’s portraits is never mere background. As Strand said,
“There are a lot of people in the world that I have no desire whatsoever to photograph. I like to photograph people who have strength and dignity in their faces; whatever life has done to them, it hasn’t destroyed them. I gravitate towards people like that.”
(Quoted in Tomkins, 1976, p. 32)
I am familiar with the Outer Hebrides from a dozen or more family holidays on North Uist and recognises in the portraits, with Catherine Duncan (2016), that, “the heads of these men and women, of their children, might be frescoes drawn on the granite, which lends its character to their flesh and blood.”
Outside of France, Strand’s later work received little public attention during the period from 1950 to the 1970 and was largely ignored in America. This was partly because of Strand’s insistence on much of his output being produced in East Germany. However, exhibitions of his work in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden led to a retrospective in Philadelphia in 1971 and subsequent exhibitions in Boston and St Louis, leading to exhibitions at MOMA and in Los Angeles in 1973.
Strand’s understanding of photography as an “instrument of research into and reporting the life of my own time” is central to an understanding of his work. Strand was an engaged photographer with clear “values and convictions”.
As he said in a speech to the International Congress of Cinema in Perugia, in 1949, while drawing an unfavourable comparison between straight photographers and pictorialists,
“We conceive of realism as dynamic, as truth which sees and understands a changing world and in turn is capable of changing it, in the interests of peace, human progress, and the eradication of human misery and cruelty and towards the unity of all people. We take sides. We take sides against war, against poverty, and align our art and our talents on the side of those whom Henry Wallace called the “Common Man”, the plain people of the world in whose hands lie the destiny of civilisations present and future well-being.”
(Cited in Tomkins, 1976, p. 161)
While his intellectual and emotional vision directed the subject of his photography, there is a unity in the way that Strand expressed his vision. His landscapes are meditative, unhurried, providing perfectly balanced accounts of place and time. His portraits do not share the sense of actualité to be found in Hine, Walker Evans or Arthur Rothstein. He did not photograph miserly bankers or ennobled workers. Nor do his photographs necessarily demonstrate the pathos of Theodor Jung or Dorothea Lange. Strand’s frank, face-on portraits of the “lives of ordinary men and women” are those in which “dynamic realism will find the drama, the conflicts and the resolutions, with which to create great art.” (Strand, 1949. cited in Tomkins, 1976, p. 165)
He was never averse to the manipulation of his images in the darkroom but Strand’s was a painstakingly straight, direct view of the world; a view that was taken from one side of the camera but one that always on the side of his subjects.
References
Barberie, P. (2014) Paul Strand (aperture masters of photography), New York: Aperture
Duncan, C in Strand, P. (2016 edition) Tir A’Mhurain The Outer Hebrides of Scotland, New York: Aperture
Hartmann, S. (1904) ‘A Plea for Straight Photography’, American Amateur Photographer 16th Mar. 1904, pp. 101–09; reprinted in Beaumont , N, (Ed.) (1980) Photography: Essays and Images New York: MOMA.
Klein, M. (20120 ‘Of Politics and Poetry: The Dilemma of the Photo League’ in The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951, New Haven: Yale University Press
Stieglitz, A., (1905) Camera Work, No. 12. October 1905. p. 59.)
Strand, P. and Meyerowitz, J. (2012) Garden at Orgeval New York: Aperture
Tomkins, C. (1976) Paul Strand: Sixty Years of Photographs New York: Aperture
