Paul Strand: A Transition, Caught on Film

Around 1916, Paul Strand turned a corner, which, like all corners, was a jutting elbow of transition between two relatively smooth planes. Romantic Pictorialist idylls preceded the turn, and humanistic portraits and sensitive landscapes followed it. On the edge itself, Strand (1890-1976) enacted a vigorous encounter with Modernism, a brief, impassioned affair with the touchy beauties of candor and abstraction.

The anomalous, exceptional work the photographer made during these years is the focus of “Paul Strand circa 1916,” a concise gem of a show curated by Maria Morris Hambourg for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. (The show makes one fortunate stop closer to home, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art this summer.)

Legendary encounters punctuate Strand’s early career. The first occurred in 1907, when Strand’s photography teacher at New York City’s Ethical Culture School took a group of students to Alfred Stieglitz’s Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession. Both the teacher, Lewis Hine, and the destination, better known as 291, made deep impressions, though it was Hine’s ennobling documentary photography rather than Stieglitz’s commitment to the new that had the most enduring impact on Strand.

Stieglitz had an epiphany of his own that year, when he first saw Cezanne’s watercolors, in Paris. An instant convert to the cause, he began showcasing the new art by Picasso, Matisse, Picabia and Brancusi as well as Americans such as John Marin and Marsden Hartley. What the young Strand would have seen at the gallery in 1907, however, were atmospheric, soft-focus photographs by the leading Pictorialists of the day, whose moody, richly toned prints aspired to the stature of painting.

Within a few years, Strand was “Whistlering,” as he put it, with the best of them--Edward Steichen, Gertrude Kasebier, Clarence White, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Karl Struss--overlaying a fuzzy Romanticism onto views composed with a Japonesque tendency toward flattened space, pattern and high contrast. When applied to the fluid rhythms of city life, this “space-filling” approach made for some highly elegant images, such as “Winter, Central Park” (1913-14), in which a tree’s dark branches draw stark calligraphy against a snowy field while framing a lone figure in the distance.

Strand brought his portfolio to Stieglitz in 1915 (legendary encounter No. 2) and was offered a show at 291, which felt at the time, he recalled, like being handed the world on a platter. Strand may have started out with the demeanor of a Stieglitz acolyte, but in the end, he had as much to offer Stieglitz as Stieglitz had to offer him, for within the following year, Strand proceeded to radically redefine the parameters of photographic art.

His city pictures lose their romantic softness and take on more of the verve and flux of their subject. “Wall Street” (1915) remains the most startling of the group, not just unromanticized but sinister; not just an image but an icon, a warning, a symbol as well as a document. In the photograph, a trickle of suited men and women, their long shadows dragging behind them, walks alongside the recently built J.P. Morgan Co. building, whose huge, dark recesses dwarf the passersby with the imposing powers of uniformity and anonymity. After more than 80 years, the image has stayed both tough and current.

In the summer of 1916, Strand went to his family’s summer cottage in Connecticut, where--steeped by then in the vocabulary of Cubism and abstraction--he set himself the task of learning “how to build a picture.” Using bowls, cups and fruit, the planar surfaces of tables and the striated patterns of porch railings, Strand created a series of close-cropped still lifes whose play of mass, line, light, shadow, tension and unity are sparklingly fresh and reductive, poetically simple.

Back in the city at summer’s end, Strand continued to experiment, this time with human subjects, trying out a camera with a fake lens mounted at a 90-degree angle to the real one, so that his subject could be shot unawares. His attempts to extract “a quality of being” from men and women encumbered by disability or poverty yielded another spate of photographic icons, direct and compassionate. “Blind” (1916) is ever disarming, especially when one imagines Strand photographing the newspaper vendor indirectly, through the deceit of his false lens, while she seems to glare hard to one side with her own unseeing eye.

Brutally honest, yet conceptually complex, these views of the “other” portend what’s to come for Strand in his later, sympathetic explorations of the people of Mexico, France, Ghana and Italy. Yet never again in his career did he embrace the edge as he did in the years around 1916. Strand’s later fame necessarily built upon this dynamic period, but “camouflaged it,” Metropolitan director Philippe de Montebello writes in the foreword to the show’s elegant catalog. Why this was so is a question beyond the scope of the present show. But even if Strand didn’t continue to reckon with that corner he turned around 1916, it’s an exquisite pleasure to do so now.

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* The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 5th Ave. at 82nd St., New York, (212) 879-5500, through May 31. The show travels to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from June 19 to Sept. 15.