Strand’s roving gaze

Paul Strand made his best-known photograph in 1917. Using a camera equipped with a hidden lens that allowed him to photograph people he passed in the street without them knowing it, the 26-year-old captured a stern-faced woman against a rough, brick wall. Two signs hang around her neck over a bulky winter coat. The small one reads “Licensed Peddler 2622 New York City.” The other, a handmade placard nearly as big as her face, is the brightest object in the dark photogravure. Its block capitals spell the word “blind.” It’s the first thing you see.

In 1950, well into a distinguished career and a restlessly peripatetic life, Strand (1890-1976) -- born Paul Stransky in New York -- made a photograph whose format echoes that of his famous picture of the blind woman. “M. Pelletier, Gondeville, Charente” is a portrait of a working-class Frenchman, the oil-stained shoulder of his coarsely woven shirt, unbuttoned vest, cracked eyeglasses and humble shop setting only enhancing the man’s everyday heroism. A cocked cap, well-groomed mustache and beard add to his gritty dignity, which is both impeccable and pedestrian.

The two pictures hang at near-opposite ends of “Three Roads Taken: The Photographs of Paul Strand,” an engaging Getty Center exhibition of 76 black-and-white photographs (and one film) Strand made from 1913 to 1954. As a pair, they trace a journey that begins with a point-blank confrontation with the cruelty of life in the big city and ends with a bittersweet romanticization of the slow satisfactions of country town life. It’s a long, strange trip attesting to Strand’s steadily sharpening skills, shifting philosophical outlook and unwavering love of photography’s capacity to reveal life in a changing world.

On the wall just inside the main entrance to the three-gallery show is a quote from Strand: “Three important roads opened for me ... My work grew out of a response, first, to trying to understand the new developments in painting; second, a desire to express certain feelings I had about New York where I lived; third ... I wanted to see if I could photograph people without their being aware of the camera.” It provides a useful framework through which to view the exhibition.

The first gallery features 22 works from 1913 to 1923. The “three roads” are well represented. The first two often travel side by side, sometimes merging.

“New York” (1913) is a lovely countryside idyll indebted to French Impressionism in its depiction of leafy trees dissolving in golden atmospheric blurriness. “Bay Shore, Long Island, New York” (1914) is more stark and graphic, its gouache-enhanced surface recalling Georges Seurat’s storybook seascapes. And “City Hall Park, New York” (1915) is a masterpiece, its vertical format and serpentine composition harking back to Japanese scrolls while its tiny figures walking every which way anticipate images of subatomic particles. Look closely at the cluster of people one-fourth of the way up the image and you can see where Strand obliterated a figure from the negative. He left in its long horizontal shadow, which forms an essential part of the finely tuned visual rhythms of the otherwise serendipitous composition.

Other works transform the walls and rooftops of New York buildings into abstract compositions animated by jutting diagonals and Constructivist formal principles. Cubist still lifes inspire Strand’s quasi-abstract studies of light and shadow. In one image, striped cigarette boxes and several bowls nearly disappear into taut arrangements of line, shape and texture. Close-ups of a polished lathe and drill rival the best works of Precisionism, bringing movie star glamour to mass-produced tools.

Strand’s pictures of people in the streets of New York are among his most haunting works. “Woman, New York” (1916) is an awesome portrait of a sturdy woman with an epic frown. The monumental image, no bigger than a sheet of typing paper, anticipates an entire generation of Depression-era photography.

The woman with the “blind” sign stands out as Strand’s most nakedly disturbing image. Its title, “Photograph -- New York,” suggests that he did not think of it as a portrait but as a mediation on the ways photography weaves together fact and fiction, truth and deception.

The image throws into focus the absurd lengths to which Strand went to get a candid photograph, affixing a false lens to the front of his camera and shooting on the sly through a lens hidden under his arm. If the woman is truly blind, the ruse is unnecessary. But the picture suggests that her left eye is anything but unseeing, peering purposefully off to her left. Just who is blind -- the woman? The viewer? The licensing agency? The cameraman? It’s impossible to know. Photography, in Strand’s hands, exploits blindness and vision to weave narratives shot through with lies and truthfulness.

Portraits depicting Rebecca Salsbury, the first of Strand’s three wives, and his friend and mentor, Alfred Stieglitz, do not fit onto the three roads he describes. They are also his least gripping works from this time.

The seven-minute silent movie Strand made in collaboration with Precisionist painter Charles Sheeler, on the contrary, is a knockout. A paean to Manhattan, modern transport and the work ethic, “Manhatta” (1921) is the missing link that connects Walt Whitman and Andy Warhol, both of whose radically democratic art celebrates the splendor of ordinary America.

A five-year gap separates the works in the first gallery from those in the second, most of which measure 4 1/2 inches by 5 1/2 inches or less. More romantic and less experimental than the earlier photographs, these beautifully printed pictures take viewers out of New York and into the woods of Maine, the farms of Vermont, the villages of Quebec and the towns of Mexico.

Strand continued to photograph people in public places, but diminished street life appears to have thwarted the use of his false-lens camera. Even so, he managed to find folks who didn’t seem to care that their pictures were being taken. His photographs of farmers, fishermen and villagers replace the confrontational shock of his New York shots with a tourist-like desire to reach across cultures and connect with strangers. Sentimentality seeps into many of these 30 works, which date from 1928 to 1947.

The influence of new painting also faded from Strand’s increasingly formalized photographs. He turned to patterns found in nature and architecture to emphasize the abstractness of his images.

In the third gallery, where 25 works made from 1950 to ’54 have been installed, portraits predominate. Made in villages in France, Italy and Scotland, most show common people staring straight into Strand’s lens. A trio of images from Luzzara, Italy, portrays a baker, a cobbler and a blacksmith, all casually posed outside their shops. In other pictures, members of the Lusetti family appear outside their humble house, sometimes as a group and at other times individually.

By this point, Strand had traveled far from the three roads on which he began. Painting was no longer a major influence. New York was no longer a subject. And rather than photograph people surreptitiously, he now directed, lighted and posed his sitters. Disheartened by the rising tide of McCarthyite conservatism, he left the United States in 1950, never to return.

Among the few indoor portraits Strand made is his image of M. Pelletier, who sits in front of a brick wall where shop tools hang. His right eye is obscured by the wire frame of his glasses, the right lens of which is cracked. This focuses attention on Pelletier’s left eye, which is all the more penetrating for its singularity. The composition echoes that of Strand’s picture of the blind street peddler. It also matches the structure of his camera, a one-eyed device through which he saw the world.

It isn’t difficult to imagine Strand identifying with both the blind woman and the working-class Frenchman, stealing glimpses of big-city life as a young man, then staring it straight in the eye as a displaced survivor of modern life’s trials and tribulations.

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‘Three Roads Taken: The Photographs of Paul Strand’

Where: The Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays and Sundays; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; closed Mondays

Ends: Sept. 4

Price: Free; parking, $7

Contact: (310) 440-7300, www.getty.edu