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"Strand, Paul, 1890-1976."
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Review/Photography; Trying to Bridge the Gap Between Art and Politics
With its extreme shifts in direction, [Paul Strand]'s career would seem to call out for a close consideration of the personal and social forces that helped shape it. But the current exhibition, the first retrospective of the photographer's work since his death, throws little light on the conflicts in his life and his art, instead burying them beneath an adulatory gloss. In the opulent catalogue, Sarah Greenough, curator of photography at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the show's organizer, attempts with mixed results to relate Strand's photographs to the work of other American artists and writers of the period. But the skimpy wall labels in the exhibition itself seldom go deeper than bland declarations like, \"Paul Strand has often been called the first modern photographer.\" The struggle between form and content that was to mark Strand's work throughout his career can be seen even in his choice of mentors. After studying with the documentary photographer Lewis Hine, Strand was championed by Alfred Stieglitz, the impresario of photographic art in America. Stieglitz was so taken with Strand's pictures that in 1917 he devoted the last issue of Camera Work, his groundbreaking journal of photography and art, to Strand's images. In this issue, Strand presented candid portraits of street vendors, beggars and others, along with photographs of the abstract patterns formed by a set of bowls and shadows on a porch. An indication of the failure of Strand's later images is how similar so many of them seem. Typically, his portraits present one or two figures posed in front of a wall or framed in a doorway, gazing soulfully at the camera. Strand's magisterial style overwhelms any sense of the people as individuals; a young boy in Gondeville, France, is depicted with the same impersonal elegance as a girl in Luzzara, Italy. The blank, monumental quality of these images suggests that Strand was more comfortable with his subjects as symbols than as people.
Newspaper Article
Foursome : Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul Strand, Rebecca Salsbury
A captivating, spirited account of the intense relationship among four artists whose strong personalities, passionate feelings, and aesthetic ideals drew them together, pulled them apart, and profoundly influenced the very shape of twentieth-century art-- Provided by publisher.
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