Paul Strand

(1890-1976)

Paul Strand in Mexico; James Krippner, Fundación Televisa/Aperture

Wikipedia

Paul Strand was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century. In the 1930s, he helped found the Photo League. His diverse body of work, spanning six decades, covers numerous genres and subjects throughout the Americas, Europe, and Africa. In his late teens, he was a student of renowned documentary photographer Lewis Hine at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. It was while on a field trip in this class that Strand first visited the 291 art gallery – operated by Stieglitz and Edward Steichen – where exhibitions of work by forward-thinking modernist photographers and painters would move Strand to take his photographic hobby more seriously. Stieglitz later promoted Strand’s work in the 291 gallery itself, in his photography publication Camera Work, and in his artwork in the Hieninglatzing studio. Some of this early work experimented with formal abstractions (influencing, among others, Edward Hopper and his idiosyncratic urban vision). Other of Strand’s works reflect his interest in using the camera as a tool for social reform. Strand was one of the founders of the Photo League, an association of photographers who advocated using their art to promote social and political causes. Strand and Elizabeth McCausland were “particularly active” in the League, with Strand serving as “something of an elder statesman.” Both Strand and McCausland were “clearly left-leaning,” with Strand “more than just sympathetic to Marxist ideas.” Strand, McCausland, Ansel Adams, and Nancy Newhall all contributed to the League’s publication, Photo News. Over the next few decades, Strand worked in motion pictures as well as still photography. In 1932–35, he lived in Mexico and worked on Redes (1936), a film commissioned by the Mexican government, released in the U.S. as The Wave.

Excerpts

“He sought during his sojourn in Mexico to create a visual record of the place, chronicling what he thought of as the country’s essential character, while fostering its revolutionary transformation through the tools of photography and filmmaking… [he] found the Mexico he was looking for: a world of stark landscapes, baroque churches, religious sculptures, campesinos, and indigenous and mestizo men, women, and children—a place charged with meaning and spirit, which he was determined to capture with his camera.”

Introduction, p. 9

“Though his passage through Mexico was relatively brief, Strand played a crucial role in constructing a remarkable—though inevitably partial—archive reflecting the ideological constructs and political struggles of that era.”

Introduction, p. 9

“These efforts were well received in Mexico… This positive reception was a significant achievement for a non-Spanish-speaking norteamericano with limited knowledge of Mexico.”

Introduction, p. 9

“This was a crucially formative moment in Strand’s artistic evolution. In Mexico, his longstanding efforts to synthesize art and social documentary photography matured as he sought to create a probing investigation into the very soul of a place—in his words, ‘a kind of portrait of a land and its people’…

Introduction, p. 11

“By the time Strand arrived in Mexico, he was a staunch proponent of ‘straight photography’—that is, photography without technical manipulation. But his firm defense of photographic ‘objectivity’ could not obviate the photographer’s subjectivity or his human inability to do or observe all things in all places.”

Introduction, p. 11

“Through his meticulous attention to detail, Strand undoubtedly sought to express something so honest and specific that it would take on universal meaning.”

Introduction, p. 13

“At the time of his death, Strand had a well-established reputation as a ‘dynamic realist’ who was at times obdurate in defense of photographic ‘objectivity.’ This image of Strand toward the end of his life tends to obscure the scope of a more complex lived experience. His thinking about art and the truth of photography developed, grew, and changed significantly over the course of his life.”

Chapter One—To End and To Begin, p. 21

“… shortly before his death, Strand stated: ‘The material of the artist lies not within himself nor in the fabrications of his imagination, but in the world around him.’… He insisted that meaning in photography lay in the exterior world, and could not be conferred by the photographer.”

Chapter One—To End and To Begin, p. 21, 22

“… his growing attention to social themes in Mexico… may be considered the maturation of an artistic vision that was profoundly influenced by Strand’s empathy for those suffering as a result of the worldwide economic crises of the 1930’s.”

Chapter One—To End and To Begin, p. 22

“… as an artist, Strand could not deny that photography is an interpretive practice with an unavoidably subjective dimension… In fact, Strand recognized and was inspired by the creative tension caused by photography’s objective and subjective dimensions throughout his life.”

Chapter One—To End and To Begin, p. 22

“… this modernist compulsion to ‘control’ reality may seem severe, restrictive—even, in a sense, totalitarian. But for Strand—as for Stieglitz before him—photography’s ability to ‘integrate,’ ‘control,’ and reproduce dynamic and complex truths with a fidelity unmatched by any other art provided a resolution to the debates about the artistic validity of the medium.”

Chapter One—To End and To Begin, p. 23

“… Strand believed that photography’s distinction as an art form came from its ability to preserve unique, complex, and changing realities with a level of exactitude that could not be achieved by any other medium.”

Chapter One—To End and To Begin, p. 24

“… his experience in Mexico would enhance his understanding that art photography and social documentary were not mutually exclusive categories, and that in fact an optimal way to construct both was to bring them together.”

Chapter One—To End and To Begin, p. 24

“‘I always felt that my relationship to photography and people was serious, and that I was attempting to give something to the world and not exploit anyone in the process.’ Though this statement was sincere and undoubtedly true, it does acknowledge the question of exploitation. Cultural distance and power imbalances inevitably separated Strand from the subjects of his photographs in Mexico. In addition to his trick lens, he required a translator and a guide to help him make his way during his travels.”

Chapter Two—Substance and Sequence, p. 35

“‘I began to find the shibboleths of the time were not true for me. It was always said that you really have to know a place before you start working in it; otherwise you would do something very superficial. Another shibboleth was that you can’t make a portrait of a person unless you know the person, and then when you know the person you create the moment or you wait for the moment when they are most alive and most themselves. These shibboleths went out the window.’”

Chapter Two—Substance and Sequence,, p. 38

“While Strand’s photographs provide a visual record of Mexico in the 1930s, his longstanding artistic interests, increasing concern with social documentary, and engagement with Mexico’s 1930s-era revolutionary nationalism frame the history they reflect.”

Chapter Two—Substance and Sequence, p. 41, 42

“Photography historian and curator Katherine Ware describes Photographs of Mexico as ‘a transition piece deeply rooted in his early experimentation with formalism and the genres of portraiture and landscape, yet breaking new ground in combining these elements to create work that used fine art techniques to dignify and vivify the human condition while using the human condition to bring meaning and relevance to the realm of art.’”

Chapter Two—Substance and Sequence, p. 42

“For Strand, photography’s great capability was to record unique moments in extraordinary detail, ephemeral instances that would pass after the shutter was snapped and contexts shifted—whether in highly dramatic or barely perceptible ways.”

Chapter Two—Substance and Sequence, p. 42

“… his insistence on documenting the religiosity of poor rural people in a dignified way is arguably the most striking aspect of Strand’s Photographs of Mexico.

Chapter Two—Substance and Sequence, p. 51

“… the carefully selected images in Photographs of Mexico construct a visual narrative that emphasizes the suffering and emotional intensity expressed in religious iconography, as mirrored in the daily life of the rural poor.

Chapter Two—Substance and Sequence, p. 51

“Strand’s portfolio Photographs of Mexico, a masterwork distinguished by its extraordinary fusion of art and social-documentary photography, reveals some of the contradictions and tensions of that conflicted era.”

Chapter Three—Intentions and Images, p. 53

“The tension between reinforcing and questioning the ideological constructs associated with the ‘cultural revolution’ of the 1920s and 1930s becomes still more complex when we examine the full range of Strand’s Mexican photography.”

Chapter Three—Intentions and Images, p. 53

“… of course, state support both enables and constrains artistic production… Strand’s work bears the imprint of revolutionary nationalism; however, the depth and nuance in both his photographs and his film Redes allow us to read ‘against the grain’ of official discourse. This is arguably the most extraordinary achievement in Strand’s Mexican oeuvre.”

Chapter Three—Intentions and Images, p. 53

“Though the intentions of the artist are by no means the endpoint in the interpretation of any work, they provide a useful vantage point from which to begin an assessment. But determining the motivations behind Strand’s Mexican photography is made slightly troublesome by the fact that—though he was very articulate in his written exegeses—Strand was far more visual that he was literary; he wrote infrequently, devoting almost all his energies to producing images.”

Chapter Three—Intentions and Images, p. 54

“It is known that Strand disliked the ‘picturesque’ tendency in photography of Mexico… By contrast, in de la Fuentes’s work, Strand asserted, ‘we see what those who go beneath the picturesque surface of Mexican life instantly recognize: the seriousness tinged with sadness; the endurance, not of servility but of courage; and a dignity which oppression was never able to destroy.’”

Chapter Three—Intentions and Images, p. 54, 55

“Strand utilized photography’s extraordinary capacity for intricate reproduction to defy—but in some senses also to reinscribe—abstract notions of lo mexicano.”

Chapter Three—Intentions and Images, p. 55

“… Strand himself believed that three themes were interwoven throughout his Mexican photography… : ‘Portraits of the People—a nation of men and women subjugated for centuries in colonial bondage, yet retaining their innate power, their militant patience, their earthy dignity. Religious Folk Sculpture—in which the Mexicans have instinctively projected in mythic form their own faith, torment, and struggle. Landscapes—vividly portraying the land in which they live, its sharp sun and lucid air… the land which has shaped them and on which they have left their indelible imprint.’”

Chapter Three—Intentions and Images, p. 56

“… Strand was drawn to the question of ‘the Indian’: the natives of the region whose traditions and customs reached back to pre-colonial times, whose incorporation into the Mexican nation remained and unfinished project (and a volatile political goal), and whose cultural identity seemed at risk due to Mexico’s burgeoning modernization. However, Strand’s thinking on this matter had a critical edge… ‘You know how damn treacherous Indian material is—whatever you do violates somebody’s half-baked conceptions of the Indian soul.’”

Chapter Three—Intentions and Images, p. 59

“Strand’s photographs of folk religious sculpture raise questions about Mexican cultural history and the political context of the 1930s. The images point toward unresolved debates over the nature of the baroque in Mexico—indeed, in Latin America generally. While in Europe baroque is generally understood as the elaborately ornate artistic genre that followed the Counter-Reformation in the seventeenth century, in Latin America, the style was appropriated and redefined in widely varied ways across different regions. The Latin America baroque did not end neatly with the rise of Enlightenment modernity in the eighteenth century; in fact, it has been argued that a baroque sensibility persists into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—and even into the postmodern present—though it has been refined with the passage of time. Whether these artifacts and sculptures are vestiges of the baroque or folk carvings of more recent vintage, or both, many observers over several decades have noted that Strand’s photographic reproductions of folk religious art convey a striking emotional intensity.”

Chapter Three—Intentions and Images, p. 60

“... Strand felt that the religiosity of the peasantry emerged out of and reflected their daily experience. It was idiom through which they made sense of their world. His decision to photograph the religious sculptures of anonymous local artists in a dignified and even beautiful way was a political choice supported by Strand’s intense commitment to photographing what he believed was there.”

Chapter Three—Intentions and Images, p. 61

“‘.. I made a series of photographs in the churches, of the Christs and Madonnas, carved out of wood by the Indians. They are among the most extraordinary sculptures I have seen anywhere, and have apparently gone relatively unnoticed. These figures are so alive with the intensity of the faith of those who made them. That is what interested me, the faith, even though it is not mine...’”

Chapter Three—Intentions and Images, p. 61

“‘I find what interests me greatly—a certain loveliness and gentleness and sweetness, which, it seems to me, is a new and important note in Mexican art. The latter, by and large, seems to incline to the somber and is characterized by a certain insistent sadness and an absence of light, an expression perhaps of revolutionary and post-revolutionary tragedy and struggle...’”

Chapter Three—Intentions and Images, p. 62

“Some of the religious sculptures are by no means somber or tortured—indeed, they seem almost quirky.”

Chapter Three—Intentions and Images, p. 62

“… Leo Hurwitz noted that the photographer had ‘written an autobiography of himself in terms of the things he had seen.’ Many viewers have commented upon the sadness that seems to be expressed in most of Strand’s Mexican subjects. Yet, like any other group, rural Mexicans surely expressed a full range of human emotions, as one would expect… Why then, the persistently dark tone in his biographical portraits?

Chapter Three—Intentions and Images, p. 62

“Photography, as Oliver Wendell Holmes remarked early on in its technical development, can be considered a ‘mirror with a memory.’ At times, however, it can be difficult to determine precisely what the mirror is reflecting. It seems clear Strand’s emotional state in 1932-33 [divorce, depressed] set the tone and determined the shape of his chronicle of a people, an era, and a place.”

Chapter Three—Intentions and Images, p. 64

“Though generations change with the passage of time, the words and images created by those who came before endure, evoking the past as we view and evaluate them from the vantage of our present.”

Chapter Three—Intentions and Images, p. 67

“From September 1933 through November 1934, Strand devoted himself almost exclusively to the conceptualization, planning, and production of the film Redes… Though controversial, the film was acclaimed in Mexico and abroad at the time of its release and is generally recognized as a classic in the history of Mexican cinema.”

Chapter Four—The Making of Redes, p. 69

[Film Director, Zinneman recalled] “‘… as a stills photographer, saw films as a succession of splendid but motionless compositions, while I was doing my utmost to get as much movement into scenes as possible.’”

Chapter Four—The Making of Redes, p. 70

“In many ways, Zinneman’s point about Strand being a ‘stills photographer’ was well taken. Parts of Redes can indeed be seen as a succession of beautifully composed still images—the close—up portraits of the rugged fishermen and of the black-shawled, grieving mother, the horizon of encroaching waves that provides the film’s enduring metaphor—these and other shots give Redes its stunning visual resonance and evince the same sensibility that Strand so carefully offered with his later selection of images for Photographs of Mexico. At the same time, the film’s rather languid pacing might be said to betray the directorial mind of a still photographer: Redes lingers insistently on those images that are particularly striking, weighing plotline momentum against visual impact.”

Chapter Four—The Making of Redes, p. 70, 71

“Made on a minuscule budget, the film was to show the struggles of the fishermen of Veracruz as they battle unjust economic and social forces, finally realizing that banding together in a union is the only way to improve their situation.”

Chapter Four—The Making of Redes, p. 64

“… the SEP’s ‘Plan’: the series of films [including Redes] that Strand originally agreed to develop was intended to ‘show in an objective way the production of wealth with the current social regime’ so as ‘to create social and socio-economic consciousness.’ In order to accomplish this all the films in the serries would unfold in a sequence that passed in a linear way from ‘phenomena of the physical and biochemical sciences to those of the economic and social sciences properly stated… the films were ‘to demonstrate in an objective manner the possibility of a social regimen whose justice is rooted in all men working and all equally obtaining the satisfaction of their needs.’”

Chapter Four—The Making of Redes, p. 76

“... the realities of making a film under existing constraints soon challenged the patience and comprehension of both the film crew and the townspeople. Strand’s ‘off the record’ letters reveal... that the making of Redes was a far more contentious, disorganized, and generally difficult process than one might expect from a utopian experiment in collaborative filmmaking.”

Chapter Four—The Making of Redes, p. 79

“Very early during the film’s production it became clear that Strand’s desire to make an epic opus on the scale of—or even surpassing—the work of Sergei Eisenstein did not mesh with the SEP’s plan for relatively straightforward and inexpensive educational documentaries.”

Chapter Four—The Making of Redes, p. 79

“... the great Russian director’s [Eisenstein] influence is apparent in Redes, particularly in the use of symbolic montage. And certainly there were parallels in their lives and their politics...”

Chapter Four—The Making of Redes, p. 80

“... Strand suggested that both these works demonstrated [U.S. director] Flaherty’s ‘immense gift for contact with primitive peoples and for re-creating or finding the elemental drama of their lives.’”

Chapter Four—The Making of Redes, p. 80

“By using amateur actors and real-life settings as much as possible, the filmmakers hoped to enhance the realism and didactic purpose of the film...

Chapter Four—The Making of Redes, p. 80

“… Chavez wrote to Strand: ‘Creative genius consists precisely in making things of the highest importance out of nothing.’”

Chapter Four—The Making of Redes, p. 82

“The Mexican members of the film crew almost certainly resented that this filmmaking opportunity—utilizing scarce state resources—had been placed under the direction of foreign nationals, a grievance that appears to have become more intense as tempers frayed over time… At any rate, these incidents indicate that, despite artistic and political convictions that were presumably shared by al, tensions existed among the filmmakers and crew along national and perhaps generational lines.”

Chapter Four—The Making of Redes, p. 83, 84

“… it is likely that most if not all the local fishermen had no idea of the full implications of the film they were making.”

Chapter Four—The Making of Redes, p. 84

(Strand:) “‘In a world in which human exploitation is so general it seems t me a further exploitation of people, however picturesque, different and interesting to us they may appear, to merely make use of them as material.’”

Chapter Four—The Making of Redes, p. 92

“… even a proponent of objective ‘straight’ photography like Strand could choose to ignore one reality—and even dissemble—in order to create a powerful comment on another.”

Chapter Four—The Making of Redes, p. 93

“Strand’s work in Mexico also brought him to a newly mature engagement with place—with the concept of creating what he later called ‘a kind of portrait of a land and its people.’”

Chapter Four—The Making of Redes, p. 94

“Despite Strand’s resolutely ‘objectivist’ stance, his images of Mexico must certainly be read as subjective impressions that provide unique, probing gazes at the complex realities of that time and place. His choices—what to place before the lens and when to snap the shutter, his editorial eye in selecting which negatives to transform into prints and which prints to release into circulation—nonetheless render a profoundly valuable chronicle of the distinctive local landscapes and architecture, the faces and and habits or rural populaces, impoverished communities, and the persistence of fervent religiosity in the decades following the armed phase of the Mexican Revolution.”

Conclusion—Past and Present, p. 96

“… the film—like the photographs—raises the provocative issue of the relationship between artistic creativity and political commitment.”

Conclusion—Past and Present, p. 96

“… it is indisputable that Redes and its musical score are exceptional works of art and vital artifacts of the time and place. The fact that the film was completed at all testifies to the perseverance of the local population and the film crew, as well as to Strand’s own extraordinary personal drive and stubborn refusal to quit in the face of countless challenges, financial, bureaucratic, and personal. The film’s central message—of the necessity of labor organization in the midst of global economic crisis—was a pertinent and controversial in the 1930s as it is today.

Conclusion—Past and Present, p. 96

“Frank S. Nugent, writing in the New York Times, complained of the film’s ‘artiness riding heavily on the left wing,’ and noted that it was ‘an interesting photographic album but a dull motion picture.’ Life Magazine gave Redes several pages of coverage, pegged with the headline ‘An American Photographer Does Propaganda Movie for Mexico.’

Conclusion—Past and Present, p. 97

“[In 1934] Strand confided to [his friend, Ted] Stevenson: ‘My life has been such a turmoil, this job so hard—so exhausting—Such a fight every inch of the way—obstacle after obstacle—such frequent critical times… this film has for the time sucked me dry—a year in this little tropical fishing village—heat and bugs—a thousand other things (sounds like self-pity perhaps) but I am so… damned tired inside (more than out) that it makes all that I do just like pulling myself up by the boot straps. … 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.’”

Conclusion—Past and Present, p. 100

“… Strand’s time in Mexico—in addition to resulting in a visual legacy that has transcended both the test of time and the shifting winds of critical commentary—was a pivotal moment in the artistic trajectory of one of the great modernist photographers of the twentieth century. These years helped Strand to address and engage the ‘esthetic problem’ he had set for himself: how to operate and succeed as an artist within the larger currents of human life.”

Conclusion—Past and Present, p. 100

Style

Themes

Plates (favorites)

My Opinions

Questions

Thoughts on Photography

There is an interesting story behind the photo of the woman on the cover of the book. The photo is actually a film still shot by Ned Scott during the filming of Strand’s movie Redes in Veracruz.

“More troubling questions about the gap between filmic image and lived reality, and about class and gender politics—those of the film and, by extension, of Strand, the SEP, and even the Mexican Revolution—are raised in Redes’s most powerful sequence. Toward the start of the film is the scene of the funeral for Miro’s young son, who died because his father could not afford basic medical care. This painful outcome of his inability to provide adequately for his son is what radicalizes Miro and sets off the story’s chain of events. Accompanied by Revueltas’s haunting music, a lengthy procession slowly carries the small casket out of the village to the cemetery. There the townspeople give the boy a traditional burial. Miro tosses the first shovefuls of dirt on the casket before furiously denouncing the injustice of the situation.

“‘On the way to the cemetery, the procession passes the child’s grieving mother, played by a local woman named Susana Ortiz Cobos, dressed in black but apparently too distraught to accompany the casket. In an interview from 1937, Strand commented on the woman’s role in the film with surprisingly frank brutality:

“Everybody who has seen the picture has remarked on the talents of that woman. So far as I know, she hasn’t any more talent than this ash tray. It was purely accidental. It so happened that, the morning we shot that sequence, she had been beaten up by her husband. Or, rather, let me put it this way: One fine morning, when she had been beaten up by her husband, we decided to shoot the sequence.

“I couldn't prevent the beating—I assure you it was done in private, behind my back—and there was no harm in taking advantage of it, was there? We needed this sequence. We had rehearsed it innumerable times. The girl, whom I picked merely for her looks, was stolid, cold, unimaginative. But on the morning when she had been smacked, she had just the right expression. She was terribly unhappy, poor thing. She looked as though she had lost her dearest friend. That was just what I wanted and we made the sequence.’

“... Ortiz Cobos was never named in the film credits or promotional materials. Given Strand’s views and his apparent disgust with the idea of making use of subjects—people—as ‘material,’ his actions and attitude here are ironic to say the least.”

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WELCOME TOURISTS

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nature in all its grandure;

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A drama of the typical fishers’ life.