Paul Strand in Mexico
"Strand approached his subjects with a reverence that can be cloying, but the work's formal restraint has real power, especially in the many portraits of working-class men, women, an children." --The New Yorker, 20-September-2010"Shooting subjects without their explicit consent is a constant and fraught topic of debate in the realm of photography, yet Strand's images don't seem exploitative, if anything they seem somewhat boringly or stereotypically ennobling- with the native people's stony faced vacant stares penetrating some unseen sun-bleached horizon." --ARTINFO.com, Emma Allen, 9-September-2010"Mr. Strand was reading Marx at this time, and considered his work `a criticism of capitalism a system I detest,' so all the portraits are of peasants and tend to valorize them. Mr. Strand made the most of his considerable technical skills." --The Wall Street Journal, William Meyers, 9-October-2010"[Strand's] images are all about the Mexican Cultural Revolution, the nobility-of-the-common-man kind of thing and are concerned with stark landscapes, heavy-onto-death religious iconography and somber campesinos who could just as well hail from the 19th century. Strand believed in what he called `collective portraits' that would define and chronicle a country, portraits of a people who were trying to overcome `colonial bondage' while `retaining their innate power, militant patience and earthly dignity."  ---The Miami Herald, Tom Austin, 6-June-2010