Paul strand self portrait hat
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Blending fictional scenes and documentary footage, Native Land focuses on union-busting in the 1930s from Pennsylvania to the Deep South. His photography, while still produced according to the codes of his 'Straight' aesthetic, relied on prose and/or poetry to give them a fuller meaning. This manufactured tourist's view of village life jarred somewhat with Strand's 'Straight' aesthetic.
One of his sitters, a young farmer's daughter named Angela Secchi, later spoke of her experience: "He [Strand] grabbed a large hat off my uncle's head and put it onto mine, he then took my uncle's scarf and an old, rumpled smock and told me to wear it on top of my dress. At once romantic and highly formal, it is considered the first American avantgarde film.
Strand was always interested in travel and in particular the capacity of the camera to reveal the qualities of place and events that would otherwise not be encountered.
Strand is often discussed as the architect of the so-called Straight Photography; a pure photographic style that utilized large format cameras to record, and bring new perspectives to ordinary or previously ignored subjects in the name of fine art. In this photograph, rather than a building, a large body of water dominates the frame; it is the cliffs, that enter from the left side of the frame, that this time cast their shadows over a body of sea (rather than pavements).
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It is unclear if the fishermen are about to set sail, or if they are preparing to moor their vessel, but the spectator is left in little doubt of its importance to their lives and livelihoods.
Silver Gelatin Print
1942
Native Land
Through Native Land Strand wanted to expose civil liberties violations in America during the 1930s.
The film focused specifically on the bill of rights which had come under attack from corporations who, amongst other things, used spies and contractors to undermine and dismantle labor unions. In keeping with the artistic and ideological traits of Strand's worldview, moreover, Native Land sought to challenge the classical Hollywood narrative by taking the ordinary American laborer and turning him from subordinate or comedy figure into the plot-carrying hero.
However, the unfortunate timing of the film's release, shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbour, meant that the country was seeking unity and had little appetite for socio-political self-examination.
Film
1953
The Lusetti Family, Luzzara, Italy
The Lusetti Family represents Strand's late period (after he had resettled in Europe) and features in his book Un Paese, Portrait of an Italian Village, which was published in 1955.
When Rosen argued that Strand had managed to avoid the trap of producing "patronizing anthropological photographs" he might well have had an image like this in mind; one that captures the personality of a subject who came to symbolize a progressive thinking and independent African state.
Gelatin silver print
Biography of Paul Strand
Childhood
Nathaniel Paul Stransky was born in New York to German-Jewish parents in 1890.
This seminal image of a street peddler was published in 1917 in Alfred Stieglitz's magazine Camera Work. Indeed, in order to achieve portraits of such arresting quality Strand devised a strategy whereby he rigged his camera with a false lens that pointed forward, while the working lens was actually placed at a ninety-degree angle and hidden from the subject's view under his arm.
He was investigating the capacity of the camera to record modernlife and was particularly interested in its ability mechanically to capture mesmerizing detail. Strand quipped "If it takes twenty years [then] you might as well forget about it!".
Strand declared that the "measure of [an artist's] talent - of his genius, if you will - is the richness he finds in such a life's voyage of discovery and the effectiveness with which he is able to embody it through his chosen medium".
He collaborated, for instance, with Claude Roy on La France de profil (1952); for Un Paese (1955) with the Italian neorealist screenwriter Cesare Zavattini (Bicycle Thieves); and for Ghana: An African Portrait (shot in the early 1960s but not published until 1976, the year of his death) Strand's images were enriched by the words of the Africanist scholar Basil Davidson.
The Legacy of Paul Strand
In 1984 Strand was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame (IPHF) on the endorsement that he had photographed the everyday world "with precision and truth".
Soon after, in 1936, Strand joined with American photographer Berenice Abbott to set up the Photo League, a group of photographers committed to the aim of raising social awareness of trade union activities and civil rights protests. Whether or not one chooses to eulogize Strand as the sole architect of Straight Photography, there can be no doubt that his photography helped cultivate the idea that it was only the camera that could show the world in such detail - only a machine could represent the world with such clarity and with such purity - and that, in the right hands, photography could hold its own within the bigger modernist program.
Writing in his book The Photograph, the scholar Graham Clarke expressed the opinion that Strand should be placed in a group including Stieglitz and the other 'Straight' adherents associated with the f/64 Group: namely László Moholy-Nagy, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, Robert Capa, Ansel Adams and Edward Weston.
Stieglitz had in fact been so impressed with Strand's artistic maturation that he adopted the Straight Photography aesthetic for his own work.