Lot Essay
Paul and Rebecca Strand spent the summers of 1930-32 in New Mexico visiting their friends Georgia O'Keeffe and Mabel Dodge while he photographed and Rebecca painted. Undergoing a reevaluation of both his artistic direction and his marriage, the time in New Mexico finalized a dramatic shift in direction for Strand's photography. He had already turned away from the urban subject matter that established his reputation on the walls of '291' and in the pages of Camera Work with images that could be summed up as formal and concerned with camera vision. Reprinted from Seven Arts magazine, a Strand essay entitled "Photography" accompanied his photographs in the last issues of Camera Work, Numbers 49/50. In it he writes: "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 prerequisite 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.... Photography is only a new road from a different direction but moving toward the common goal, which is Life." (c.f. Camera Work: A Critical Anthology, p. 326). In seeking to attain this goal Strand sought out subjects far from the urban surroundings of New York City. Like his contemporary Charles Sheeler (with whom he made the film Manhatta in 1921, based on Walt Whitman's poem Mannahatta) Strand always found modernist material in rural settings. Several of Strand's abstractions reproduced in Camera Work were executed in Connecticut. (See: Lot #163)
The roots of Strand's humanist and naturalist concerns lie in the abstractions from Twin Lakes of 1916-17. They predict the nature studies of Maine from the late twenties and suggest the efforts in New Mexico in the early thirties. In The Transition Years: Paul Strand in New Mexico Steven Yates writes: "If '291' was Stieglitz's "gallery of aesthetic experimentation" for establishing the breadth of modern possibilities in the artist's chosen medium, New Mexico became the laboratory for Strand to test the potentials of his own vision within photography. What made the Southwest work uniquely compelling was his feeling for another direction with a renewed artistic freedom reminiscent of the early '291' years. Only now the photographer moved from the mastery of experience. ...Correspondingly, his work began to expand further upon the dichotomies of formal and humanist concerns along the precarious balance of abstraction and uncompromising literal realism. The period was filled with growing intellectual and spiritual conflicts that surrounded the artist. The conventions and patterns of what he had learned artistically were perceived as practiced limitations that needed to be renegotiated through his new work." (op. cit. p. 13)
It has also been suggested that while in New Mexico Strand pursued an extended portrait of the place, much like Stieglitz's portrait of O'Keeffe or Strand's own documentation of Rebecca. "...Strand began gradually to shift his focus from one that attempted to extract a sense of place to one that was more concerned with the broader concept of portraiture." (Paul Strand: An American Vision, p. 41) More to the point, "Throughout the 1920s many of the Stieglitz artists were preoccupied with the issue of portraiture, both in the specific and more universal sense. ...Hartley's Adventures in the Arts...Carl Sandburg's Lincoln...or even Stieglitz's composite portrait of O'Keeffe were all attempts to arrive at a new understanding of the nature of American portraiture" (ibid). Strand's "portrait" was never completed and he left later in 1932 for Mexico where he remained for the next two years. While Strand's work in New Mexico remained incomplete as a project (he photographed none of the inhabitants except for one Indian dance) he did manage to record in long views and in detail an essence of what it meant to be in New Mexico.
It would seem that Strand was still concerned with an "intensity of vision" in New Mexico. As a mature artist, however, he was able to add to his view of art as a sublime reach transcending everyday reality, by continuing to create images from vernacular subject matter without recycling the extremes of close-up and severe cropping so potent in his early work. With much of his life in flux (his marriage would dissolve shortly thereafter) images such as Buttress become significant beyond their documentation value or as an artist's attempt to expand a project's parameters. In a time of change and conflict, Buttress, Rancho de Taos Church can be seen as a simple yet dramatic reflection. It is a modernist's haiku of sorts, contemplating light, atmosphere, Earth and infinity.
Of four documented vintage platinum contact prints of this image, the lot offered here is the only extant print outside the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum (which it duplicates); the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Paul Strand Archive.
The roots of Strand's humanist and naturalist concerns lie in the abstractions from Twin Lakes of 1916-17. They predict the nature studies of Maine from the late twenties and suggest the efforts in New Mexico in the early thirties. In The Transition Years: Paul Strand in New Mexico Steven Yates writes: "If '291' was Stieglitz's "gallery of aesthetic experimentation" for establishing the breadth of modern possibilities in the artist's chosen medium, New Mexico became the laboratory for Strand to test the potentials of his own vision within photography. What made the Southwest work uniquely compelling was his feeling for another direction with a renewed artistic freedom reminiscent of the early '291' years. Only now the photographer moved from the mastery of experience. ...Correspondingly, his work began to expand further upon the dichotomies of formal and humanist concerns along the precarious balance of abstraction and uncompromising literal realism. The period was filled with growing intellectual and spiritual conflicts that surrounded the artist. The conventions and patterns of what he had learned artistically were perceived as practiced limitations that needed to be renegotiated through his new work." (op. cit. p. 13)
It has also been suggested that while in New Mexico Strand pursued an extended portrait of the place, much like Stieglitz's portrait of O'Keeffe or Strand's own documentation of Rebecca. "...Strand began gradually to shift his focus from one that attempted to extract a sense of place to one that was more concerned with the broader concept of portraiture." (Paul Strand: An American Vision, p. 41) More to the point, "Throughout the 1920s many of the Stieglitz artists were preoccupied with the issue of portraiture, both in the specific and more universal sense. ...Hartley's Adventures in the Arts...Carl Sandburg's Lincoln...or even Stieglitz's composite portrait of O'Keeffe were all attempts to arrive at a new understanding of the nature of American portraiture" (ibid). Strand's "portrait" was never completed and he left later in 1932 for Mexico where he remained for the next two years. While Strand's work in New Mexico remained incomplete as a project (he photographed none of the inhabitants except for one Indian dance) he did manage to record in long views and in detail an essence of what it meant to be in New Mexico.
It would seem that Strand was still concerned with an "intensity of vision" in New Mexico. As a mature artist, however, he was able to add to his view of art as a sublime reach transcending everyday reality, by continuing to create images from vernacular subject matter without recycling the extremes of close-up and severe cropping so potent in his early work. With much of his life in flux (his marriage would dissolve shortly thereafter) images such as Buttress become significant beyond their documentation value or as an artist's attempt to expand a project's parameters. In a time of change and conflict, Buttress, Rancho de Taos Church can be seen as a simple yet dramatic reflection. It is a modernist's haiku of sorts, contemplating light, atmosphere, Earth and infinity.
Of four documented vintage platinum contact prints of this image, the lot offered here is the only extant print outside the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum (which it duplicates); the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Paul Strand Archive.