A Year in the Life
Paul Strand
(1890-1976) enjoyed a long and prolific career spanning what amounts to five or
six generations in the compressed history of 20 th century
photography. In the last 60 of those years he made an impressive number of
worthy images, full of human dignity and topical picturesqueness and formal
achievement. Had those 60 years constituted his entire career, we could
relegate him to a historical back shelf along with so many other humanistic
pillars of midcentury photography, stalwarts of Life and The Family
of Man whose work today primarily inspires a nagging sense of duty.
For a couple of years in
his youth, however, Strand was a radical Modernist who made one startling
picture after another, progressing in giant leaps that apparently occurred
month to month. With dazzling speed he went from being a promising imitator to
discovering dozens of avenues that would be explored by others in the ensuing
decades. "Paul Strand: Circa 1916" is the appropriately dazzling record of that
period, gathering for the first time nearly all his surviving work of the
time--a mere 60-odd photographs--into a sort of time-lapse film of the process
of discovery. If you have ever wondered what inspiration might look like
graphically represented, this is the show to see.
Strand was a product of the progressive Jewish New York
middle class. His aunt was a pioneer of the then-new kindergarten movement, and
his education was completed at the Ethical Culture School, which prized the
rounding effects of training in practical skills, including--impressively for
the time--photography, taught by the great Lewis Hine. His postgraduate studies
took place at the New York Camera Club, a hobby league whose members were
doctors and lawyers less interested in art than in craft, and then he
gravitated toward the artistic forefront of the medium, namely, the
Pictorialists. This movement was just beginning to splinter. Under the
proprietary leadership of the photographer and all-around impresario Alfred
Stieglitz, the group had called itself Photo-Secession, which sounded radical
and daring, but Stieglitz was so obsessed with achieving artistic legitimacy
that the group's work restricted itself to counterfeiting the effects of
drawing and painting. The images were soft, vague studies of moony, "timeless"
subjects, maidens in dappled fields and the like. Edward Steichen was
particularly skilled at delivering prints that looked like daubings untouched
by any mechanical process and wholly innocent of the industrial world.
Soon erstwhile
Photo-Secessionists were chafing under the harness, but Strand immediately took
to the more conservative elements, and between 1911 and 1913 he produced
appropriately languid views of shimmering water; decorative sheep; and
unfocused, mildly erotic light effects. He was fascinated by the Japanese-print
flatness bequeathed by the Impressionists; in Maid of the Mist, Niagara
Falls (1915), he managed to cheat scale so much that the boat looks like a
bathtub toy against the swirl of rocks and spume. By the time he made that
picture, though, he had already taken in works by more venturesome
Pictorialists that showed the modern city as itself and had produced
Railroad Sidings, New York (1914): a couple of willful diagonals of
boxcars surmounted by a tangle of rails and a head of steam that has nothing to
do with mist.
Very soon he was touring the country, bringing back new
ideas about line and volume, as in Telegraph Poles, Texas (1915): some
stripped trees leaning over, bearing aloft a neat grid of wires, towering over
flatland and stumpy shacks. Nothing precious or European there, but a picture
that had never been made before (but would, in one way or another, be made
again and again by others over the next 50 years). Back in New York, Strand
started investigating the graphic dynamism at work in the shadows thrown down
by the el tracks, and he began seriously investing in the possibilities of the
overhead vantage, a Modernist urban trope he would will to Berenice Abbott and
sundry Germans and Russians. The scooped-out city canyon, embellished with a
frieze of human heads at the bottom (, 1915), was a theme that looked new in
the work of Gary Winogrand in the 1960s. The row of giant black rectangles
dominating puny pedestrians walking below ( Wall Street , 1915) inspired
numerous social interpretations, but to our eyes it might look like an
anticipation of obdurate monoliths by artists from Ad Reinhardt to Richard
Serra.
In the summer of 1916, Strand
went off to his family's country house in Twin Lakes, Conn., and there he
decided to take on the Cubism of Picasso and Braque using available materials.
He arranged bowls, jugs, and fruit in sunlight or whipped them with the shadows
of the porch railing, then left the objects alone and began rearranging the
position of his camera instead. The pictures become increasingly free; they can
almost be sequenced as a flipbook as they swing from still life to pure
abstraction and from the ground up toward dramatic diagonals in the sky. Back
in town again, he set about making portraits in the slums, arming himself with
a camera equipped with a false lens at a right angle to the actual one so he
could photograph unsuspecting subjects. The people--peddlers, drunks, sandwich
men--are observed not just as formal objects, although they are affected by
shadows and textures and sign-fragments, and not just as social types, as in
Hine's pictures, but also as complex, weathered personalities. Some of them,
such as Man, Five Points Square and the iconic Blind (both 1916),
are among the greatest photographic portraits ever, an accumulated life visible
all at once in their subjects' features.
Before his great surge gave
out in 1917, he had also begun photographing machinery--a hallmark of the work
of the two following decades in Europe and America--and he had also made a few
pictures that synthesized everything he had learned. Chief among these, in my
view, is From the Viaduct, New York (1916), a picture of a billboard, a
false front, a couple of roofs, a fence, and some people in the street that
marches the eye up one side and down the other, seamlessly blending all his
knowledge of light and shade, volume and flatness, geometry and the shapes of
letters, human proportion and the American scene. It has been hiding out all
these years in a private collection, a barely known monument of the most
liberating Modernism, the kind that the viewer can take out into the world to
transform its least prepossessing elements into jazz and verve. The same could
be said of the exhibition as a whole, and its splendid catalog: They animate a
process that, 80 years later, still seems new.
