OLD MAN, 1915

# Photography To Me

TEXT AND ILLUSTRATIONS BY PAUL STRAND

From April 25 to June 10, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City will hold a one-man retrospective exhibition consisting of 200 photographs taken by Paul Strand from 1915 to 1944. The show will include his early abstract pictures and candid photographs, his highly individual close-ups, his documentary series, his pictures of New Mexico, Mexico and the Gaspe, and his most recent landscapes made in Vermont last winter. Following the close of the show in New York, the exhibition will be sent on tour throughout the United States for the next two years.

In the winter of 1907, a young teacher of biology at the Ethical Culture High School took a small group of youngsters to an international exhibition of photography at the “Photo Secession Gallery” at 291 Fifth Avenue, in New York. Alfred Stieglitz was the guiding genius of this little gallery which was to become the famous “291”.

The young instructor who took us there was Lewis Hine whose own passionate interest in photography had induced the

school to build a darkroom and allow him to conduct a class after hours in camera technique, developing and printing. This was the man who later gave up his teaching career and became a pioneer in the photo story in America. His photographs of child labor in the textile mills, the story of immigrants at Ellis Island, remain some of the most sensitive and moving documents of that time.

For, that winter afternoon, he introduced us to a new kind of photography

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MOTION PICTURE CAMERA, 1923

in the two tiny rooms of the Photo Sc-
cession. To be sure, some of them looked
more like paintings than photographs: the
big gum prints by the Germans — Watzek,
Kuhn, Henneburg, the Hofmeisters, or the
prints of the Frenchmen — Demachy and
Puyo. But there were the Hill portraits,

landscapes by Annan and Stieglitz, Stei-
cen's portrait of J. P. Morgan and prints
by Clarence White. They looked liked
photographs, but not just ordinary records
of the camera. These prints gave you the
same kind of pleasure and exhilaration
that you got from masters of painting, a

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CERRO, NEW MEXICO, 1932

good book, fine music. Yet they were straightforward photographs. It was a great revelation to us to see that photography in which we were so much interested, could produce works of art when artists were in back of the camera. It was a wonderful afternoon, and it gave one young man, myself, the conviction that here was a medium to which one could well devote one's life. This conviction carried me on and has never been shaken.

This belief that photography could be an important medium of art expression never faltered, but I soon found out there were no easy roads in that direction. First of all there were the techniques of the camera, of chemicals and papers to control, just as a writer has to learn to write or a sculpturer to model clay and cut stone. But beyond that was the long road, while learning from others, to knowing what you wanted to say about the complex world around you, what was im-

portant, what was unimportant to you. In short, a point of view and the ability to put it in a photograph.

It took me nine years to do this, with many discouragements and frequent setbacks. Most of my time had to go to earning a living. But in the years between 1907 and 1915 I did learn something about photography and what I wanted to say with it. In this learning there were two great sources of help and inspiration: one, the then new controversial developments in painting, Picasso, Braque, Matisse: the other, the wonderful criticism I got from Stieglitz when I brought some new prints to “291” every few years.

The modern painters of that day puzzled and “insulted the intelligence” of many people. I was puzzled too, but interested, and finally after a time I thought I began to understand what they were driving at. In deliberately distorting or eliminating a subject matter, these painters

[44]

THE MARKET,
TENANCINGO,
MEXICO, 1933

were trying to get at and emphasize the
abstract elements of form, space, color
and line which have their counterpart in
such a purely abstract art as music. We
get an emotional impact and excitement
from a symphony by Beethoven through
the statement and interweaving of themes,
through the formal structure and develop-
ment, rhythms and counterpoint. Going
back to look at the old masters, I found,
even in the realistic work of Greco, in the
photographs of Hill and the earliest work
of Stieglitz, that the unity of these same
esthetic elements played a vital role. I
concluded that a photograph, too, to be
a complete work of art, must also contain
this same kind of unity, that subject matter

alone was not enough.

IN 1915 I really became a photographer.

Before that, progress was sometimes
painfully slow, and then suddenly came
that strange leap into greater knowledge
and sureness which is a common ex-
perience of many people, I am sure. By
the end of 1916 I had started in every
direction in which my work has since gone.
There were the first conscious experiments
in purely abstract forms in photography,
the result of which I applied almost im-
mediately to photographs of New York.
Camera angles shooting up and down
were explored. Then came the series
of close-up candid portraits of people in

(Continued to page 86)

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