Still Searching…

<div>The recent retrospective exhibition of Paul Strand’s photographs, organized by the <a href="http://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/805.html">Philadelphia Museum of Art</a> to celebrate its purchase of more than 3000 prints and lantern slides from the Paul Strand Archive at the Aperture Foundation and coming to the <a href="http://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/exhibitions/21652_paul_strand_photography_and_film_for_the_20th_century">Fotomuseum Winterthur</a> in March, provides an ideal moment to think about Strand’s contribution and how he has been fashioned as a master of “modernist” photography (if not the slippery status of not-for-profit institutions that sell donated works to raise funds, perhaps the subject of another blog).<br><br></div>

<p>In my last post, I suggested that we should rethink how we might read “politics” into the works of Paul Strand.  I put “politics” advisedly into quotes, because few photographs can translate specific political tenets or party lines into form. Apart from a unique photograph called <a href="http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/310991.html?mulR=21244|1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">“Skeleton and Swastika, Connecticut”</a> contrived in 1938-39, Strand was no John Heartfield and never directly attacked scowling financiers or aggrandized noble workers in the fields in his still photographs. He remained above all an artist with a distinct social point of view, who recognized that the power to shift the public’s attention by forcing it to visually engage with the overlooked was his greatest gift.</p>

<p>The same year that Strand shot <a href="http://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/articles/27002_reading_strands_new_york_photographs_city_hall_park" target="_blank" rel="noopener">City Hall Park </a>he took another, somewhat similar picture in a second prominent location, <a href="http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/74108.html?mulR=1483769599|11" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York</a>. Still perched above his subject but physically closer than he was in the courthouse north of City Hall Park, Strand was shooting from the second-floor window of Marius de Zayas’s Modern Gallery at 500 Fifth Avenue. The building is now gone, but from photographs it seems that he had to be behind a window (was it opened?) using a lens that radically compressed the width of Fifth Avenue and brought him nearer street traffic while catching a bit of a unfocused cornice in the lower left.</p>

<p>In 1916, the same year that Paul Strand made his remarkable studies of lower-class types caught unawares by a disguised camera lens, he moved away from New York’s crowded streets to capture backyards visible from a bird’s-eye perspective.</p> <p></p> <p></p>

<div>I started this blog by posing some questions about the arbitrariness of dividing Paul Strand’s career into a late period of political subject matter and activism and an early period that seemed devoted primarily to formal concerns. Certainly, this is something of a straw man, because most of us would agree that the visual arts are inherently about shaping matter, with all its inherent recalcitrance, into form, regardless of the desired or received “meaning” of that shaped form. <br><br></div>