Lot Essay
In 1920, Strand collaborated with Charles Sheeler on the seven minute film Manhatta (originally titled New York the Magnificent). Strand and Sheeler shared the belief that New York's true spirit was found in the towering structures of its architecture. As Strand stated, he sought to capture in the film "those elements which are expressive of New York, its power and beauty and movement". (Greenough, An American Vision, pp. 39-40)
The machine defined the modern city and in these tools of industrialization Strand and his contemporaries found a modern visual language. Like Paul Outerbridge's Marmon Crankshaft, Sheeler's images of the Ford River Rouge plant and later in Walker Evans' series of tools for Fortune magazine, Strand's close-up portrait of gears in the Akeley machine shop is a study of the modern machine, not merely as a mechanical object, but as a form with dynamic, aesthetic qualities. In the early 1920s, Strand made several still life studies of machine age objects, including his series of the Akeley Motion Picture Camera, framing the machine much as he had the urban world in his film work. These images were among the last works Strand made relating to the European Modernist movement of the 1910s. As Sarah Greenough notes, "... after 1925, he stopped photographing urban-industrial architecture and machines; both were too much the products of the rampant materialism of American culture." (An American Vision, p. 40)
The machine defined the modern city and in these tools of industrialization Strand and his contemporaries found a modern visual language. Like Paul Outerbridge's Marmon Crankshaft, Sheeler's images of the Ford River Rouge plant and later in Walker Evans' series of tools for Fortune magazine, Strand's close-up portrait of gears in the Akeley machine shop is a study of the modern machine, not merely as a mechanical object, but as a form with dynamic, aesthetic qualities. In the early 1920s, Strand made several still life studies of machine age objects, including his series of the Akeley Motion Picture Camera, framing the machine much as he had the urban world in his film work. These images were among the last works Strand made relating to the European Modernist movement of the 1910s. As Sarah Greenough notes, "... after 1925, he stopped photographing urban-industrial architecture and machines; both were too much the products of the rampant materialism of American culture." (An American Vision, p. 40)