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Paul Strand: 'Devoid of Trickery'
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20309 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1992 |
1,859 Words |
| Author
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Judith Bell
Judith Bell is an art historian and novelist based in
Arlington, Virginia. |
"Paul Strand plants himself before things--a face, a worm eaten door or a tool--and leaves them alone," wrote the poet Claude Roy in 1952 in his preface to La France de Profile, Strand's photographic study of France. For Roy, the photographer's work was as fresh and startling as it had been in 1917 for Alfred Stieglitz, the renowned photographer who introduced modernist art to the American public. Stieglitz had called Strand's photographs "brutally direct, pure, and devoid of trickery." And so they remain for us today.
There is spareness, a fearless approach to the essence of things, that characterizes the whole of Strand's sixty-year career. Disinterested in recording fleeting moments, Strand's desire was to achieve images that were at once grounded in the real world yet beyond the reach of time. The touring retrospective organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the centennial of Strand's birth reveals just how fully he managed to reach his goal.
Much that is modern in photography began with Paul Strand and his early experimentations with the medium. "The photographer's problem," he wrote in 1917,
"is to see clearly the limitations and at the same time the potential qualities of his medium, for it is precisely here that honesty, no less than intensity of vision, is the perquisite of a living expression. This means a real respect for the thing in front of him expressed in terms of chiaroscuro...through a range of almost infinite tonal values which lie beyond the skill of the human hand. The fullest realization of this is accomplished without tricks of process or manipulation through the use of straight photographic methods."
Strand's proposal for "absolute, unqualified objectivity" in photography was a bold one at a time when the influence of soft-focus pictorialism, which aimed at appealing to the imagination rather than copying nature, was just beginning to wane. Born in New York City in 1890, he was one of a group of American writers, poets, cultural historians, and artists who came of age during the First World War. Foretelling the birth of a new American culture, they optimistically spoke of the greatness of the national self-awareness that would now be America's following the war's ending of its dependency on Europe. Like these reformers, Strand believed in values, convictions, the dignity of humanity. Art was seen not only in relation to the artist who made it but in the larger context of audience and community. Art based in everyday reality could nourish the world that gave it
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