Still Searching…

<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>