## PHOTOGRAPHY TO ME

*(Continued from page 46)*

the streets and parks, based on the idea of their complete unawareness of the camera. These were done with a quarter plate reflex using a shiny false lens screwed on the side, a clumsy technique, but it worked fairly well in those days. And finally, I also began the close-ups of machinery.

It was these photographs which brought me my first one-man show, in 1916, at the same little gallery of "291" to which Lewis Hine brought me in 1907. That exhibition and the publication by Stieglitz of my work in numbers 48 and 49.50 of CAMERA WORK were also a turning point in my

life. For both were all the acknowledgment I needed then to feel that I had found my own way as a photographer.

After a year in the army as an X-ray technician, 1918 and 1919, and years devoted chiefly to work as a free-lance motion picture cameraman, I made a group of machine photographs in 1923, continuing the earlier experiments. These machines which play so important a role in our lives seemed to me to be not only useful, but also beautiful. I tried to photograph the power and marvelous precision which the very functional forms, surfaces and lines of a machine reflect.

In 1926 I was able to go to the Rockies, and in 1927 and 1928 to Maine during

*(Concluded on page 90)*

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[86]

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Here for your pleasure are over 800 beautiful Kodachrome slides. Nature's beauty captured in full color. Select any quantity from the list below.

<table><tbody><tr><td>Yosemite</td><td>(24 views)</td><td>Dinosaur Park, N.D.</td><td>(6 views)</td></tr><tr><td>San Francisco Fair</td><td>(12 views)</td><td>Mayo Clinic</td><td>(6 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Fisherman's Wharf</td><td>(6 views)</td><td>New York City</td><td>(12 views)</td></tr><tr><td>California Big Trees</td><td>(6 views)</td><td>Washington, D. C.</td><td>(6 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Crater Lake</td><td>(12 views)</td><td>Ozark Mts.</td><td>(6 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Columbia River Hwy.</td><td>(6 views)</td><td>Mt. Rushmore</td><td>(6 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Mt. Rainier</td><td>(6 views)</td><td>Bad Lands of S.D.</td><td>(6 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Yoho Park</td><td>(6 views)</td><td>Taos Indians</td><td>(12 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Lake Louise & Banff</td><td>(18 views)</td><td>Forest Lawn, Calif.</td><td>(6 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Glacier Park</td><td>(24 views)</td><td>Ghost Town</td><td>(6 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Yellowstone</td><td>(30 views)</td><td>PasadenaRoseParade</td><td>(6 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Tabernacle, S.L. C.</td><td>(6 views)</td><td>Univ. of Michigan</td><td>(6 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Teton Forest</td><td>(6 views)</td><td>Guatemala</td><td>(12 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Bryce Canyon</td><td>(18 views)</td><td>Mexico</td><td>(6 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Hawaii</td><td>(24 views)</td><td>CALIFORNIA MISSIONS</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Grand Canyon</td><td>(30 views)</td><td>San Juan Capistrano</td><td>(6 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Petrified Forest</td><td>(18 views)</td><td>Santa Barbara</td><td>(6 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Palm Canyon</td><td>(6 views)</td><td>San Gabriel</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Lake Arrowhead</td><td>(12 views)</td><td>San Luis Rey</td><td>(6 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Big Bear</td><td>(6 views)</td><td>Palo and San Diego</td><td>(6 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Los Angeles</td><td>(12 views)</td><td>SOUTH AMERICA</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Death Valley</td><td>(12 views)</td><td>Argentina</td><td>(30 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Hollywood</td><td>(18 views)</td><td>Bolivia</td><td>(12 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Zion Park</td><td>(18 views)</td><td>Brazil</td><td>(6 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Niagara Falls</td><td>(6 views)</td><td>Chili</td><td>(24 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Las Vegas, Nev.</td><td>(6 views)</td><td>Ecuador</td><td>(6 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Painted Desert</td><td>(6 views)</td><td>Paraguay</td><td>(6 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Oak Creek Canyon</td><td>(6 views)</td><td>Peru</td><td>(30 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Sunset Crater</td><td>(6 views)</td><td>Port of So. America</td><td>(6 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Walnut Canyon</td><td>(6 views)</td><td>Uruguay</td><td>(24 views)</td></tr></tbody></table>

Color slides of important points of interest in the European theater of war, as well as war airplanes and slides of our battleships from paintings by Lieut. Comdr. Arthur Beaumont.

<table><tbody><tr><td>Venice, Italy</td><td>(6 views)</td><td>Turkey</td><td>(6 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Rome and Naples</td><td>(6 views)</td><td>Palestine</td><td>(18 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Tunis</td><td>(6 views)</td><td>Egypt</td><td>(24 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Malta & Yugoslavia</td><td>(6 views)</td><td>Navy Ships in Action</td><td>(12 views)</td></tr><tr><td>Athens, Greece</td><td>(12 views)</td><td>War Planes in Action</td><td>(18 views)</td></tr></tbody></table>

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PHOTOGRAPHY TO ME

(Concluded from page 86)

the summer. These contacts with the land opened to me the intense life which is to be found in trees, and woods, in the details of rock, growing plants, a cobweb or driftwood on a beach. This fruitful period for me led, in the following years, to Gaspe, the austere North, and again to the dramatic vastness of the Southwest — New Mexico.

Here a new problem for me presented itself, that of trying to unify the com-

plexity of broad landscape as opposed to the close-up of approachable and relatively small things. There are not only many photographs but also many paintings in which the sky and land have no relation to each other, and the picture goes to pieces. For the photographer, the solution of this problem lies in the quick seizure of those moments when formal relationships do exist between the moving shapes of sky and the sea or land. For this I turned to a Graflex and the snap shot.

In Mexico, 1932 and 1933, I went back, after sixteen years, to the idea of photographing people without their being conscious of the camera. This time a prism on my 5 x 7 Graflex solved the technical problem. These portraits, together with landscapes and photographs of the carved images in the churches, were attempts to make a kind of portrait of a land and its people.

For nearly 10 years, film making, begun in Mexico with "The Wave", took me away from still photography. These were the difficult years of the depression and the rise of those who caused the present war. Many artists felt that they must use their craft to speak out on these things. Films could reach many people. I was co-editor of "Heart of Spain" which warned against Nazi and Italian fascism in their brutal attack against the Spanish Republic. My associates made "China Strikes Back" which told the story of Japanese aggression in China. "Native Land," which I photographed, expressed the need of defending Civil Liberties in our country.

Not until 1944 was I able to take out my still camera once more, this time in Vermont. It was a sheer delight to develop a negative again and make a print, to continue along the photographic roads upon which I had travelled so many years. Of course, my photographs are the best indication of what I have tried to do, and the final test of what photography has meant to me.

[90]

CONTENTS

1. Near Saltillo

2. Church · Coapiaxtla

3. Virgin · San Felipe · Oaxaca

4. Women of Santa Anna · Michoacan

5. Men of Santa Anna · Michoacan

6. Woman · Patzcuaro

7. Boy · Uruapan

8. Cristo · Oaxaca

9. Woman and Boy · Tenancingo

10. Plaza · State of Puebla

11. Man with a Hoe · Los Remedios

12. Calvario · Patzcuaro

13. Cristo · Tlacochoaya · Oaxaca

14. Boy · Hidalgo

15. Woman and Baby · Hidalgo

16. Girl and Child · Toluca

17. Cristo with Thorns · Huexotla

18. Man · Tenancingo

19. Young Woman and Boy · Toluca

20. Gateway · Hidalgo

Produced by and Available from
APERTURE INC., New York City

Paul Strand

THE
MEXICAN
PORTFOLIO

Da Capo Press • New York • 1967

It has always been my belief that the true artist, like the true scientist, is a researcher using materials and techniques to dig into the truth and meaning of the world in which he himself lives; and what he creates, or better perhaps, brings back, are the objective results of his explorations. The measure of his talent—of his genius, if you will—is the richness he finds in such a life's voyage of discovery and the effectiveness with which he is able to embody it through his chosen medium.

Paul Strand, 1963

This extraordinary series of twenty photographs, made by Paul Strand in Mexico in the early thirties, was first issued in 1940 in an edition of 250 copies and sold by subscription only. Immediately hailed as a milestone in the history of photographic publishing, it has long been unavailable at any price.

No superficial tourist's view is found in this candidate for the most beautiful volume of this year. Agony and strength elevating the common man to heroic proportions are what Strand saw in Mexico.

—Gerald Sykes

These photographs are a silent explanation of Mexico—her people, her land, her religion, and their integral relation to each other. Presented here together are the somber churches, the arresting icons, the enduring peasants. Yet each of the twenty separate prints stands by itself as a masterful work of art.

Their beauty, their simplicity, their deep quiet feeling, the amazing craft cunning contained in them, the tireless effort of a first line artist shown in each piece of work convinced me that surely Strand is one of the finest artists (in any medium) this country ever produced.

—Clifford Odets

The Da Capo Press edition of *The Mexican Portfolio*, limited to 1000 numbered copies, each signed by Paul Strand, has been hand-printed from the original flat gravure plates under the supervision of Paul Strand. Each plate is printed on hand-moulded, all-rag Rives paper, and varnished by hand. The twenty photographs are contained in a portfolio bound by Russell-Rutter. A letterpress reprint of the original Foreword by Leo Hurwitz, Paul Strand's note on the second edition, and a statement by David Alfaro Siqueiros accompany each portfolio.

In his note, Strand confirms the exceptional quality of these reproductions, made to meet his own high standards: "Work should never be less than good; this work, I think, is superlative." The Da Capo Press edition has been produced by the publishers of *Aperture*, the most important photographic periodical of the last fifteen years, universally acclaimed for its standards of reproduction. And, in fact, rarely have photographs been reproduced so well. The depth of Strand's work is clearly apparent in each print, in a textual warmth and richness which evoke all of the sensitivity and power, as well as the underlying simplicity, of his vision. Nancy Newhall has written that the portraits in *The Mexican Portfolio* "attain a massive solidity and intensity that recall the work of [David Octavius] Hill." As a breathtaking cross-section of all he has "brought back," Paul Strand's *Mexican Portfolio* shows the full measure of his talent—and his genius.

I remember very well the night when I first saw them and one of them I still remember as clearly as though I held it in my hand.

—Archibald MacLeish

20 hand-pulled gravure plates, 8-page text
in portfolio with slipcase.

Second Edition

$125.00

Paul Strand

New York City 1890 - 1976 Orgeval, France

Photography, which is the first and only important contribution thus far, of science to the arts, finds its raison d'être, like all media, in a complete uniqueness of means. This is an absolute unqualified objectivity. Unlike the other arts which are really anti-photographic, this objectivity is of the very essence of photography, its contribution and at the same time its limitation....

The photographer's problem therefore, is to see clearly the limitations and at the same time the potential qualities of his medium, for it is precisely here that honesty no less than intensity of vision, is the requisite of a living expression. This means a real respect for the thing in front of him, expressed in terms of chiaroscuro (color and photography having nothing in common) through a range of almost infinite tonal values which lie beyond the skill of human hand. The fullest realization of this is accomplished without tricks of process or manipulation through the use of straight photographic methods. It is in the organization of this objectivity that the photographer's point of view toward Life enters in, and where formal conception born of the emotions, the intellect, or of both, is as inevitably necessary for him, before an exposure is made, as for the painter, before he puts brush to canvas. —Paul Strand *Seven Arts* 1917

*On the Cover:* "Wall Street, New York 1915," palladium.

Copyright © 1982 The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
Illustrations copyright and reproduced by permission of The Paul Strand Foundation,
Elm Street, Millerton, NY 12546.

Catalogue designed by Marilan Lund, and typeset by Open Studio, Ltd., Rhinebeck, NY 12572.

In a long and prolific career that has included films and books in addition to still photography, American master photographer Paul Strand's most influential achievement remains his earliest—establishing “straight photography” as the dominant aesthetic of the medium's second century.

Inspired by the modernist paintings and sculpture exhibited at the landmark Armory Show of 1913, Strand was drawn to “291,” Alfred Stieglitz’s influential avant-garde gallery on Fifth Avenue. Strand had first visited the gallery in 1907 as a student in Lewis Hine’s photography classes at the Ethical Culture School in New York. Stieglitz—once the promulgator of pictorialist photography—responded enthusiastically to Strand’s photographs which showed the results of his attempts to grasp through photography the meaning and imagery he had seen in modernist art.

By the time Strand joined Stieglitz's circle in 1915, he had evolved away completely from the soft-focus pictorialism that guided his earliest work (and dominated photographic art for this century's first decade) to unmanipulated, straight photography, a mode that celebrates the camera's unique ability to record the reality of the subjects before it. Together Stieglitz and Strand upheld the idea that unaltered, straight photographs could be works of art.

*Creative artists do influence each other in various ways. But this is much less deep than the direct influence of the world in which the artist lives and his response to it.* —Paul Strand letter to Van Deren Coke 1958

Abstraction, Porch Shadows, Connecticut 1916 (On My Doorstep)

It is true that it is not the subject matter alone which is important but the significance the artist sees in it and heightens. This is the essence of a work of art. However, it seems to me that in the long tradition of the arts, subject matter has played a major role. Basically, it has been the stuff of reality, the world closest to the hearts and minds of men. People and their relationship to this world in which they live, their efforts to discover, understand, and mould it have ever been the subject matter of art.... —Paul Strand *Popular Photography* 1947

From the sumptuous *Camera Work* plates of 1916-17, through his many books, to the recently issued silver print portfolios, gravures, and platinum/palladium prints, Paul Strand's life work of nearly seventy years has involved the idea of making his photographs accessible through publication.

The *Camera Work* issues (nos. 48 and 49/50—the last Stieglitz published of his modernist journal) contained six and eleven Strand gravures respectively, the second being totally devoted to the photographer's work. From the 1920s into the 1930s Strand worked as a free-lance cinematographer and independent filmmaker: *Manahatta* 1921, *The Wave* 1935, *The Plow That Broke the Plains* 1935, *Heart of Spain* 1940, and *Native Land* 1942 are some of the important films among the many he worked on. More than two decades elapsed before Strand's next publication: an edition limited to 250 copies of 20 hand-pulled photographs, *Photographs of Mexico*, issued in 1940.

I am very interested, and always have been, in the problem itself, of putting words with images in various ways. I feel that they enrich each other. The images enrich the text and vice versa.

—Paul Strand interview with Milton Brown for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution 1971

In 1945 Nancy Newhall mounted Strand's first retrospective exhibition, which was also the first exhibition devoted to a photographer at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At Newhall's instigation and with her collaboration, Strand began work on a book about New England to contain selected texts by writers associated with the region; in 1950 *Time in New England* was published. "It was a major turning point in my development" is the way Strand described this signal achievement, the start of a newly productive phase that resulted in five more books with various authors over the next quarter century on France, Italy, the Outer Hebrides, Egypt, and Ghana.

Never a wealthy man, Strand did not enjoy the freedom of a permanent, properly equipped darkroom until the 1950s, when he settled in France at Orgeval, outside Paris, with his wife, Hazel Kingsbury. This fact and Strand's exacting demands of craftsmanship account for his having made so few prints from his negatives. So it was with a deep and urgent commitment that Strand in his final years undertook the production of the photographic portfolios—a project made possible with the aid of master darkroom printer Richard Benson.

Woman, Patzcuaro 1933 (The Mexican Portfolio)

Published in 1976, Portfolio I *On My DoorSTEP* and Portfolio II *The Garden* contain eleven and six silver prints respectively, executed under Strand's exacting and passionate supervision in his darkroom at Orgeval. The first provides a review of Strand's long career, evidencing its constancy and depth; the second contains late work, intimate and timeless images from Strand's garden. Portfolios III and IV were printed posthumously under the vigilant and devoted guidance of the photographer's widow, according to master prints approved by Strand before his death in 1976. Additional issues of platinum, palladium, and silver prints, made in 1976 and 1977, will be the last fine prints available from his original negatives. In these efforts the guiding force has been Michael Hoffman, friend of the Strands, Editor of Aperture, Inc., and director of the Alfred Stieglitz Center at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The Paul Strand Foundation supports the publication of other editions of Paul Strand's photographs. Ten hand gravures from Strand's original negatives, *The Formative Years 1912-1917*, and *The Garden at Orgeval*, a book of photographs by Paul Strand, will be published by Aperture, Inc. in 1983.

Together, the diverse editions provide a handsomely varied and full summation of Paul Strand's richly humanistic vision, and further the late photographer's wishes that his work continue to be available in printed form.

*The material of the artist lies not within himself nor in the fabrication of his imagination, but in the world around him. The element which gives life to the great Picassos and Cézannes, to the paintings of Van Gogh, is the relationship of the artist to*

From the Viaduct, 125th Street, New York 1915

Yawning Woman, New York, ca. 1915

Still Life, Pear and Bowls, Twin Lakes, Connecticut 1916

City Hall Park, New York 1915

Hudson River Pier, New York, ca. 1914

From the El, New York 1915

## Limited Editions in Palladium, Platinum, and Silver

Wall Street, New York 1915; palladium, 10 1/8 x 12 11/16"

Wire Wheel 1920; palladium, 12 13/16 x 10 5/16"

Church, Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico 1931; platinum, 6 13/16 x 8 9/16"

Alfred Stieglitz, Lake George, New York 1929; silver, 6 1/8 x 7 3/8"

## Books by Paul Strand

*Time in New England* with Nancy Newhall (NY: Oxford University Press 1950); 2nd edition, with a preface by Paul Metcalf and commentary by Beaumont Newhall (Millerton, NY: Aperture 1980); also, deluxe edition with one hand gravure

*La France de profil* with text by Claude Roy (Lausanne: La Guilde du Livre 1952)

*Un Paese* with text by Cesare Zavattini (Turin: Giulio Einaudi 1955)

*Tir a'Mhurain* with text by Basil Davidson (London: MacGibbon and Kee 1962); first published in Dresden 1962

*Living Egypt* with text by James Aldridge (NY: An Aperture Book, Horizon Press 1969); also published in Dresden and London 1969

*Ghana, An African Portrait* with text by Basil Davidson (Millerton, NY: Aperture 1976)

Fall in Movement, Orgeval, France 1973 (Portfolio Four)

Acknowledgements

This exhibition has been organized by The New York Public Library in cooperation with The Paul Strand Foundation from whose collection the portfolios, gravures, and platinum, palladium, and silver prints on view have been lent.

The Library gratefully acknowledges the generosity of Miss Sandra Payson whose continuing support has made possible the production of this brochure.

Books by and about Paul Strand may be purchased at the Membership Book Shop in Astor Hall of The New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.