Paul Strand at the Art Museum (3rd review)

On the other hand, great painting is inexhaustible: There are some works that I’ll never finish looking at. Photographs, by contrast, are pure surface, and their impact is there all at once. You can study them and admire the way they achieve their effects. You can watch the development of a style. But you read them all at once. A photograph lacks overtones. It’s a fixed moment. It doesn’t resonate with time.

Photography’s impact on painting was, of course, profound, but the reverse was also true. From the beginning, photographers aspired to the status of artists, and as painters responded to the challenge of a medium that eliminated one of painting’s classic functions — to render the external world accurately and preserve it for memory — by distorting that world expressively and even by ceasing to portray it entirely, photographers followed. Thus Alfred Stieglitz sought to create photographs that mimicked the style and texture of late 19th-century painting. Among those he influenced was Paul Strand.

Capitalism’s triumph

Strand (1890-1976) may have been the greatest American photographer of the 20th century; he is at any rate among the top handful. In the comprehensive exhibit now on display at the Art Museum, we see, viewing it chronologically, some of Strand’s earlier, Stieglitz-influenced work— respectable enough, but painfully derivative. Within a few years, though — and particularly in Strand’s annus mirabilis, 1916 — we see a fully declared style that uses pictorial Cubism not as a model but as an ethos.

This philosophy is most famously expressed in Strand’s Wall Street (1915), which juxtaposes swiftly moving figures and their shadows against the monumentality of the building they pass and against whose impassive regard they are measured. Something is captured here of the whole venture of finance capitalism that couldn’t have been expressed in any other medium: the tension between men and the creations that dwarf them, the abstraction of money itself. Plenty of painters would strive to capture this feeling, from the Italian Futurists to the Mexican muralists, but the cool objectivity of Strand’s image — both the photographer’s eye and the nature of his medium — cut to the heart of the matter as nothing else could.

Wall Street might be juxtaposed with Lewis Hine’s equally famous Power House Mechanic Working on Steam Pump (1920), which depicts a young worker in an undershirt applying a large wrench to a gear, his arm muscles suggesting the power of the machine he tends (and also his subservience to it). It’s a striking picture, but one that Strand wouldn’t have taken because of its obviously posed character. Strand wanted real life in his pictures, and his best ones, however carefully composed, always strive toward the unrepeatable instant, the vanishing point where reality meets duration to cast its shadow, the image.

Paean to New York

Strand’s 1916 New York portraits, stark and candid, illustrate the same point. The most famous of them is Blind Woman, New York, which shows the face of a woman in raw weather, presumably begging. Her face is simultaneously closed and entirely exposed. We see all and read nothing; it is a slate on which endurance alone is written. It is also a face that could only exist in a large city, the woman’s sightlessness reflecting those who fail to see her, too. In a way, it is the human reduction of Wall Street’s black, shadowed spaces between the pillars, which dominate the picture like eyes opened enormously on emptiness.

Like other Modernists, however, Strand also responded to New York’s raw energy, and his 1921 film, Manhatta, made with Charles Sheeler, is a paean to the city. Film was a logical extension of the sense of movement Strand caught in such photographs as The City, with its pedestrian flow against the downtown traffic of cars and horse-drawn carriages.

He returned to the medium in Waves (1936) and Native Land (1942), and all three films are on rotating display at the exhibit. Both of the latter films address labor exploitation, Native Land in a particularly frontal way. The fishing sequences in Waves show a lyric, celebratory gift that, though clearly indebted to Eisenstein, is nonetheless compelling. Strand might have made film a second career, but the documentary moment in American filmmaking passed with the coming of World War II, and he went back to his old camera, this time concentrating on rural scenes and close-ups of natural forms.

Exile in France

The reactionary Truman years caught up many of Strand’s leftist friends and colleagues, among them Alger Hiss, and Strand abruptly left the U.S. in 1949 to settle in a small French town, Orgeval, his home for the remainder of his life. The exhibit is silent about this self-imposed exile, but presenting Strand as a pictorial formalist obviously robs a good deal of his work of its context, particularly the later photographs he took in Luzzara, Italy, and also in newly independent Ghana.

The New Left generation of the 1960s would scorn their Progressive and New Deal predecessors, a gesture that severed important connections and left it rudderless in the backlash of the 1970s and beyond. Strand himself would work into his last decade. His 60-year career was both an artistic and a political testament to his time.

Thanks to still and moving photography, the 20th century was self-observed and recorded as none before it could be. As you pass through the last room of the Art Museum’s exhibit to the inevitable bookstore, Strand’s cameras stand on their tripods like silent sentinels. Their like won’t be seen again, not with digitalization. Nor will Strand’s.

To read another review by Victor L. Schermer, click here.

To read another review by Pamela J. Forsythe, click here.