Manhatta – Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive

Exhibition: ‘Paul Strand: The Balance of Forces’ at Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris

Exhibition dates: 14th February – 23rd April, 2023

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Parmesan, Luzzara 
1953
Gelatin silver print
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive. Fundación MAPFRE Collections

Balance of forces

Look at the “colour” of the Parmesan cheese in Strand’s photograph Parmesan, Luzzara  (1953, above). If we think of Ansel Adam’s ‘Zone System’ (the 11 zones in the system from 0-10) where pure black is Zone 0, mid grey (the colour of a Kodak Grey Card) is Zone 5 and pure white is Zone 10… then in “real life” the colour of the wheel of Parmesan would fall in about Zone 5. But what does Strand do? He places the “colour” of the Parmesan wheel in Zone 2-3, much darker than in real life.

In Strand’s “continuous search for a photographic formalism” – that is, the most important aspect of the photograph being its form, the way it is made and its purely visual aspects rather than its narrative content or its relationship to the visible world – then we would ignore Strand’s moving zones, his dark, brooding cheese.

I think not.

Strand’s formalism does not stand alone, for his photographs breathe the subject he is photographing. They are not just surfaces (which is what formalism is), for the viewer is invited to imbibe (absorb or assimilate (ideas or knowledge)) of the intensity and feeling of the culture and people from which these photographs emerge. Feel the intensity of the gaze of Young Boy, Gondeville, Charente, France (1951, below). Imagine placing yourself in the ethereal space of Tir a’Mhurain, Isle of South Uist, Outer Hebrides (1954, below). Dark cheese.

Strand’s photographs are formal and yet they contain a luminiferous ether/real – transmitting light, but also acting as a medium for the transmission and propagation of spirit.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

The Fondation HCB offers a new perspective on the work of American photographer Paul Strand (1890-1976) from the collections of the Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid. While Strand is often celebrated as a pioneer of straight photography, this exhibition also addresses the deeply political dimension of his work.

Through each trip, Paul Strand tries to tell the real life of people: humble people, affected by wars, bad weather, diseases, oppressive regimes… The artist highlights those who fight for their freedom, for their happiness. Touching stories, which give all their power to these photographs.

Art and documentary research, social and political involvement and the desire to remain objective: these ambivalences bring great strength to Paul Strand’s work. It is these opposing imperatives that make his photographs so interesting, so exciting for us as viewers.

Cécile D. “Exhibition Paul Strand Or The Balance of Forces, A Journey in Photos at the HCB Foundation,” on the Sotir Paris website February 13, 2023 [Online] Cited 19/03/2023

Interview de Clément Chéroux sur l’exposition Paul Strand ou l’équilibre des forces

Martine Franck (British-Belgian, 1938-2012)
Photographer Paul Strand in his garden, Orgeval
1972
© Martine Franck / Magnum Photos

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Wall Street, New York
1915
Platinum/palladium Print
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive. Fundación MAPFRE Collections

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Sandwich Man, New York
1916
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive. Fundación MAPFRE Collections

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Blind Woman, New York
1916
Gelatin silver print
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive. Fundación MAPFRE Collections

In the mid 1910s Paul Strand produced a series of images of New York portraying a truly genuine perspective of the city. Strand, a young photographer at the time, connected with modern art and incorporated some of its tendencies into a series of unprecedented views of the metropolis. Anticipating Straight Photography, he made images that distanced themselves from the precepts of Pictorialism through a direct portrayal of reality.

His photographs rapidly found favourable reception within the pages of Camera Work, the legendary magazine directed by Alfred Stieglitz who dedicated the last two issues of the publication to Strand’s compositions. Almost half of the images that appeared were close-up portraits shot with a rudimentary system that allowed Strand to photograph his subjects without them noticing. These surprising shots offered a lively perspective of the city and focused on some of its figures, who were marginal albeit ubiquitous, and seldom represented. With this attention to the periphery of urban life, Strand manifested his commitment to reality rooted in the example of his mentor Lewis Hine.

Blind Woman is one of the most iconic images in the history of North American photography. Published in 1917 by Stieglitz it combines the compositional strength and sharp clarity characteristic of Strand’s work.

Text from the Fundación MAPFRE Collections website

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Abstraction, Bowls, Twin Lakes, Connecticut
1916
Gelatin silver print
22.5 × 16.5cm
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive. Fundación MAPFRE Collections

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Abstraction, Porch Shadows
1916
Silver gelatin print
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive. Fundación MAPFRE Collections

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Portrait, Washington Square Park, New York
1916 (negative); 1917 (photogravure)
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive. Fundación MAPFRE Collections

“Opposites are cured by opposites,” goes the saying. American photographer Paul Strand (1890-1976) was heir to two great traditions in photography, often presented as opposed. He had a formalist approach that sought to prove photography an art, and a social approach, which saw photography as more of a documentary instrument serving political ends. Perhaps this is explained by the fact that Alfred Stieglitz and Lewis Hine, who occupy the two poles in photography history, were both Strand’s mentors in his formative years.

While in the mid-1910s Strand photographed faces of the people on the streets of New York, the first period of his work is especially marked by formalism. In 1917, when Stieglitz dedicated the latest issue of his famous magazine Camera Work to Strand, it was above all to show that photography had its own artistic language. Starting with a journey to Mexico City (1932-1934), then Moscow (1935), his approach became more political. He joined the American Labor Party and worked with more than twenty organisations classified “anti-American” during the McCarthy era, leading to his departure from the United States for France. Many of Strand’s choices were deliberated through this political conscience: his choice of subject, places he photographed, writers he worked with, the book as main vector for distributing his work.

In the past few decades, numerous exhibitions have been held on Strand focusing on his formalism. By no means minimising this perspective, the current project seeks to recontextualise Strand, emphasising the importance of his political commitments. Between formalist pursuits and social concerns, the two forces at work in his art are brought into balance here. If Strand often stands among the 20th century’s major photographers, it is precisely because he knew how to offer just equilibrium between the two poles.

The exhibition presents almost 120 prints from the collections of the Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid, the film Manhatta made by Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler in 1921 as well as several prints lent by the Centre Pompidou.

Biography

Born in 1890 in New York, Paul Strand entered the New York Ethical Culture School (ECS) in 1907 where he studied under Lewis Hine, who introduced him to the Photo Secession gallery, founded by Alfred Stieglitz at 291 Fifth Avenue. Stieglitz had an important influence on Paul Strand’s work from the beginning. In 1916, his work was published for the first time in Stieglitz’s magazine, Camera Work, of which he was an avid reader, and then exhibited at 291 in the exhibition Photographs from New York and Other Places. During the war, Paul Strand worked as a hospital radiographer and, after his close-ups of machines, began to take an interest in surgical technique. In 1919 he travelled to Nova Scotia in Canada where he photographed his first landscapes and rock piles.

In 1921, Paul Strand made the film Manhatta with the photographer and painter Charles Sheeler. Between 1925 and 1932, various exhibitions of his work were shown in New York galleries. He travelled to Mexico from 1932 to 1934, during which time he had a solo exhibition at the Sala de Arte in Mexico City, was appointed Head of Film and Photography at the Mexican Secretariat of Education, and directed the film The Revolts of Alvarado (Redes) for the Mexican government.

Paul Strand travelled to the USSR in 1935, where he met Sergei Eisenstein. He then joined the Nykino group, around Leo Hurwitz, Ralph Steiner and Lionel Berman. Two years later, he became president of Frontier Film, a non-profit educational film production company, with former Nykino members.

In 1943, Paul Strand returned to photography after more than ten years in the film industry. In 1945, MoMA gave him a solo exhibition. From 1949 to 1957, the photographer undertook several trips to Europe, from which several books were written, and began an exile outside the United States, which coincided with the period of McCarthyism. He settled in Orgeval, France, where he remained until his death in 1976.

Press release from the Fondation HCB

Manhatta (1921) | Paul Strand – Charles Sheeler

In 1920 Paul Strand and artist Charles Sheeler collaborated on Manhatta, a short silent film that presents a day in the life of lower Manhattan. Inspired by Walt Whitman’s book “Leaves of Grass,” the film includes multiple segments that express the character of New York. The sequences display a similar approach to the still photography of both artists. Attracted by the cityscape and its visual design, Strand and Sheeler favoured extreme camera angles to capture New York’s dynamic qualities. Although influenced by Romanticism in its view of the urban environment, Manhatta is considered the first American avant-garde film.

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
St. Francis Church, Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico
1931
Platinum/palladium Print
17.1 × 21.8cm
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive. Fundación MAPFRE Collections

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Men of Santa Ana, Lake Pátzcuaro, Michoacán
1933
Gelatin silver print
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive. Fundación MAPFRE Collections

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Man with Hoe – Los Remedios
1933
Gelatin silver print
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive. Fundación MAPFRE Collections

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Cristo with Thorns – Huexotla
1933
Silver gelatin print
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive. Fundación MAPFRE Collections

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Mr. Bolster, Weston, Vermont
1943
Silver gelatin print
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive. Fundación MAPFRE Collections

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Mr. Bennett, West River Valley, Vermont
1944
Gelatin silver print
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive. Fundación MAPFRE Collections

In 1945 a major exhibition dedicated to the work of Paul Strand took place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that included 172 photographs, becoming the greatest retrospective devoted to a photographer to date. The project was conceived by Nancy Newhall, Head of the Department of Photography at the institution, who during the show’s preparation proposed to collaborate with Strand on a book about New England, a region located in the northeastern United States.

For a little over a month and a half Strand travelled with his camera throughout the region. His previous experience in Mexico had provided him with an attentive eye for capturing the social and cultural reality of the territory; in this instance through photographs of landscapes, diverse forms of architecture, and through his characteristic portraits. Resulting from this process his first photobook, Time in New England, was published in 1950, with texts by Nancy Newhall. The project’s outcome and his successful collaboration with Newhall inspired Strand to initiate a series of publications that coincided with a growing demand for travel books.

Text from the Fundación MAPFRE Collections website

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Café Planchon, France
1950
Gelatin silver print on baryta paper
24.4 × 19.4cm
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive. Fundación MAPFRE Collections

In 1950 Paul Strand left the United States due in great measure to the increasingly hostile social and political environment generated by the “witch hunt” of McCarthyism. Together with Hazel Kingsbury, who would become his third wife, Strand arrived in France. After their wedding that following year, they traveled the country together. Resulting from this journey and following the format of joining image and text that was established in his book Time in New England, the artist produced La France de Profil [France in Profile] in 1952. The book was published by renowned Swiss publisher Guilde du Livre, with texts by the writer and poet Claude Roy, whose points of view on the social reality and the ethical commitment of artists coincided with Strand’s.

In Café Planchon Paul Strand presents a rhetoric characteristic of the avant-garde, one of texts that belie the visual reality they attempt to portray, which grants them an inevitable and warm ironical distance. The image also contains a sense of artistic joy that is not merely related to the formal composition but is manifested in the proliferation of the vegetation, in the tactility of textures, and in the charming gradation of light that is finally enveloped by shadow. The richness of the image arises as a result of the photographer’s attention to this particular reality, which is celebrated in the book, as well as his technical prowess and the dedication he poured into the prints made in the darkroom.

Text from the Fundación MAPFRE Collections website

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Fisherman, Banyuls, Pyrénées-Orientales, France
1950-1951
Silver gelatin print
16.1 × 12.5cm
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive. Fundación MAPFRE Collections

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Young Boy, Gondeville, Charente, France
1951
Gelatin silver print
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive. Fundación MAPFRE Collections

In 1952 Paul Strand published La France de profil [France in Profile] which included the photographs he took during his trip throughout the country. With texts by Claude Roy, the book was published by Swiss publisher Guilde du Livre, which had been producing a collection of travel books since the 1940s containing texts by well known writers such as Paul Éluard and Jacques Prévert, and photographs by artists such as Robert Doisneau and Michel Huet.

In a similar fashion to how he had articulated a unique perspective far from the hegemonic exoticising of Mexico during the 1930s, Strand portrayed France in a way that did not settle on its most picturesque features. As inferred by the title, the series is an oblique perspective on the territory materialised through an assortment of images that are arranged in a singular style. Towns, landscapes, examples of vernacular architecture, and faces of elderly people and fishermen appear next to photographs detailing small objects that – beyond their documentary value – join the artistic language of images while simultaneously evoking the time that is inscribed within them.

Young Boy captures the characteristic intensity of the gamut of black and white hues in Strand’s work. The beauty hidden within the heroic ruggedness of the boy’s face, emphasised by the artist’s treatment of light, exemplifies the way in which Strand’s attention to the artistic values he upholds effectuates his political commitment.

Text from the Fundación MAPFRE Collections website

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Anna Attinga Frafra, Accra, Ghana
1951
Gelatin silver print
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive. Fundación MAPFRE Collections

Throughout the 1960s, during the Cold War, Paul Strand continued his documentary work traveling to different socialist countries such as Romania, Egypt, and Ghana. As evidenced by the series of photobooks that he published, Strand’s perspective on these realities is translated into portraits, landscapes, and images of the communities’ daily life and their objects. Nevertheless, although direct references to political issues are eloquently scarce in his photographs, some elements can be observed that subtly point to the positive aspects of the revolutionary processes occurring in these countries.

Such is the case of the portrait of Anna Attinga Frafra – included in Ghana: An African Portrait (New York, Aperture, 1976) – in which the simplicity of the composition points to one dissonant element: the books balanced on the girl’s head. The symbolic character of the image serves as a reference to the literacy and education campaigns planned for the Ghanaian populations, which included women, and has an undoubtedly, albeit subtle, propagandistic nature. Nevertheless, the photograph makes sense and coexists seamlessly with the other images that make up the series. As a whole, they offer a vision that is an alternative from ethnographic typology, incorporating the reality of the aspirations, efforts, and hopes of the community without becoming crude propaganda.

Text from the Fundación MAPFRE Collections website

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
The Lusetti Family, Luzzara, Italy
1953
Gelatin silver print
16.9 × 21.3cm
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive. Fundación MAPFRE Collections

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Luzzara
1953
Gelatin silver print
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive. Fundación MAPFRE Collections

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Postmistress and Daughter, Luzzara, Italy
1953
Silver gelatin print
33.3 × 26.4cm
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive. Fundación MAPFRE Collections

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
House, Benbecula, Isle of South Uist, Outer Hebrides
1954
Silver gelatin print
14.9 × 11.7cm
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive. Fundación MAPFRE Collections

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Milly, John and Jean MacLellan, South Uist, Hebrides
1954
Silver gelatin print
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive. Fundación MAPFRE Collections

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Agnes MacDonald, Morag and Ewen MacLellan, Isle of South Uist, Outer Hebrides
1954
Silver gelatin print
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive. Fundación MAPFRE Collections

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Tir a’Mhurain, Isle of South Uist, Outer Hebrides
1954
Silver gelatin print
14.8 × 12.4cm
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive. Fundación MAPFRE Collections

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Un paese
1955
Silver gelatin print
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive. Fundación MAPFRE Collections

300,000 lire, 10 sheets, 10 pillowcases, 10 towels, 10 parures and the bedroom are not enough to marry me, you can’t do less. He has to go into the army, otherwise we’d get married right away even if there’s little work. This year he has done less than a thousand hours of work.

Text by Zavattini, photographs by Paul Strand, Turin, Einaudi, 1955, p. 73

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Iordache Ciaocata, Bicaz, Romania
1960
Silver gelatin print
33.2 × 35.7cm
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive. Fundación MAPFRE Collections

Paul Strand book covers

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
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Exhibition: ‘Charles Sheeler from Doylestown to Detroit’ at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Exhibition dates: 22nd July – 5th November 2017

Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965)
Side of White Barn, Bucks County, Pennsylvania
1915
Gelatin silver print
© The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
White Fence, Port Kent, New York
1916 (negative); 1945 (print)
© Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation

Charles Sheeler is a cracking good photographer who’s work has not got the recognition that it deserves – in comparison to, say, Stieglitz, Strand, Steichen or Weston. When you think of those top echelon artists from the early twentieth century, his name is never mentioned. And it should be.

Sheeler’s Side of White Barn, Bucks County, Pennsylvania (1915, above) predates one of the most famous early modernist photographs, Strand’s White Fence, Port Kent, New York (1916, above) by a year, yet is hardly known. While Strand’s image possesses low depth of field, strong lighting and a focus on the fence as physical, geometric, sculptural object within the picture frame, Sheeler’s photograph is much more subtle but no less effective in its modernist vocation. The pictorial space is flattened into geometric shapes, the bottom of the photograph grounded by a cracked wall, hay, chickens and a fence, the top of the image foreclosed by the tiled roof of the barn and its attendant shadow (showing that the sun was high in the sky when this image was taken). Within the boundaries of the rectangle are subtle graduations of tone, colour and form, almost like an modernist etching with light, so beautifully does the artist both understand what he is seeing and how to render it through the physicality of the print. Unlike Strand’s “knock you over the head with the white picket fence”, Sheeler’s subtle paean to the modern world requires contemplation on the nature of light, photography and the fine art print. This is a masterpiece in the history of photographic art.

I am similarly convinced by Sheeler’s Ford Plant – Criss–Crossed Conveyors (1927, below), in my opinion one of the top ten photographs of all time.

I cannot fault this image. The light falling on the subject is incredible (notice the shadow from the beam mid-upper left, telling us the time of day the photograph was taken), the tonality superb, the framing of the subject admirable – all elements tensioned perfectly within the pictorial plane. The bottom of the photograph is grounded by stacked tyres and the structure ascends to the heavens from there… not just in one element, but in five! The main criss-cross of the conveyors is placed off centre supported by an iron tower, which allows the eye to roam freely across the image. The placement also allows for another elevator to ascend behind the main two, while a set of steps climbs higher and higher eventually exiting the picture stage left. Behind the criss-crossed conveyors the depth of space that must exist in reality is proposed by two tanks, further reinforced by 8 chimney stacks, and yet this photograph evidences no such depth of field. While everything is reduced to flattened shapes in this machine age, modernist, objectified world – and while no human being is presented for scale – the human hand is all over this image: in the construction of such technology, in the presence of the human scale stairs, in the ascension to the sky of the organ pipes of the industrial cathedral, in the comprehending eye of the photographer, and in the presence, the aura, of this magnificent print. While this image may seem the antithesis of humanist photography in one sense, conversely it reaffirms the very act of humanity in another. Or perhaps I’m just an old romantic.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965)
Doylestown House – The Stove
about 1917
Gelatin silver print
© The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965)
Doylestown House – Stairs from Below
Negative date: about 1916-1917
Gelatin silver print
© The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965)
Doylestown House – Stairwell
Negative date: about 1916-1917
Gelatin silver print
© The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965)
Buggy, Doylestown, Pennsylvania
Negative date: 1917
Gelatin silver print
© The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965)
Manhatta – Ferry Docking
Negative date: 1920
Gelatin silver print
© The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

This exhibition celebrates the MFA’s unparalleled holdings of works by Charles Sheeler (1883-1965), presenting 40 photographs from three significant series created during the heyday of his career as a founder of American modernism.

After enjoying success as a painter, Sheeler initially took up photography as a way to make a living. His experiments with the medium included the 1916-1917 series of photographs capturing various elements of an 18th-century house he rented in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The sequence of stark, geometric compositions was among the most abstract and avant-garde work being made in the US at the time – created in response to the Cubist art of Picasso and Braque that Sheeler had previously encountered in Europe.

In 1920, Sheeler collaborated with fellow photographer Paul Strand on the short film Manhatta, presenting dramatic views of lower Manhattan. Abstract stills from the 35mm film, which was shot from steep angles, are presented alongside larger prints of Sheeler’s cinematic images of New York City, produced shortly after Manhatta – which he used as source material for his paintings. The film Manhatta is on view in the gallery.

Charles Sheeler from Doylestown to Detroit culminates with the 1927 photographs of the Ford Motor Company plant in River Rouge, Michigan, commissioned to celebrate the introduction of Ford’s Model A. The cathedral-like scenes convey an optimism for American industry, and are now considered icons of Machine Age photography. All of the photographs in the exhibition are drawn from the Museum’s Lane Collection – one of the finest private holdings of 20th-century American art in the world, including Sheeler’s entire photographic estate – given to the MFA in 2012.

Text from the MFA website

Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler
Manhatta
1921
Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive

Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965)
Manhatta – Rooftops
Negative date: 1920
Gelatin silver print
© The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965)
Manhatta – Through a Balustrade
Negative date: 1920
Gelatin silver print
© The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965)
New York, Buildings in Shadows and Smoke
Negative date: 1920
Gelatin silver print
© The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965)
Ford Plant – Criss–Crossed Conveyors
1927
Gelatin silver print
© The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965)
Ford Plant – Ladle Hooks, Open Hearth Building
Negative date: 1927
Gelatin silver print
© The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965)
Ford Plant – Stamping Press
Negative date: 1927
Gelatin silver print
© The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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Exhibition: ‘Paul Strand: Photography and Film for the 20th Century’ at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Exhibition dates: 19th March – 3rd July 2016

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Wall Street, New York
1915
© Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation

Last day for this exhibition from one of the masters of photography. Apologies to the gallery and the readers that I did not get the posting up earlier but I have just been so busy at work. At least we have a record of the exhibition online.

Some of the media images were in a really shocking state. I can’t believe that an artist of Paul Strand’s standing would ever have wanted his photographs distributed in such a state – for example, enlarge the unrestored Milly, John and Jean MacLellan, South Uist, Hebrides (1954, detail) below, and then look at the restored version above that I have digitally cleaned.

What can you say about Strand that has not already been said before? He is a seminal figure in the history of photography. His Wall Street, New York (1915, below) is still one of my favourite images of all time – for its light, foreboding, and incisive comment on capitalism and the worker. Follow this by one of the first truly “modernist” images, and one that changed the course of photography (and what a difference a year, and an image makes), White Fence, Port Kent, New York (1916, below) and you set the scene for a stellar career. To have that natural perspicaciousness: a penetrating discernment – a clarity of vision or intellect which provides a deep understanding and insight – is an element of wisdom that cannot be taught. As an artist, you’ve either got it or you haven’t.

As is observed in the Wikipedia entry on perspicacity, “In 17th century Europe René Descartes devised systematic rules for clear thinking in his work Regulæ ad directionem ingenii (Rules for the direction of natural intelligence). In Descartes’ scheme, intelligence consisted of two faculties: perspicacity, which provided an understanding or intuition of distinct detail; and sagacity, which enabled reasoning about the details in order to make deductions. Rule 9 was De Perspicacitate Intuitionis (On the Perspicacity of Intuition). He summarised the rule as

Oportet ingenii aciem ad res minimas et maxime faciles totam convertere, atque in illis diutius immorari, donec assuescamus veritatem distincte et perspicue intueri.

We should totally focus the vision of the natural intelligence on the smallest and easiest things, and we should dwell on them for a long time, so long, until we have become accustomed to intuiting the truth distinctly and perspicuously.”

Intuiting the truth distinctly and perspicuously… quick to pick out, from among the thousands of things he sees, those that are significant, and to synthesise observations. This is what Strand does so well. His photographs are honest, direct, without ego. They just are. They live and breathe the subject. How do you get that look, that presence such as in Young Boy, Gondeville, Charente, France (1951, below). That presence is repeated again and again – in rocks, tendrils, people, buildings, landscapes – and finally, in the last years of his life, in intimate, sensitive and complex images of his garden at Orgeval. God bless that we have great artists like Paul Strand.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the V&A for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Installation photographs of the exhibition Paul Strand: Photography and Film for the 20th Century at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London

For the first time in the UK in 40 years a major retrospective on the American photographer Paul Strand (1890-1976) opens at the V&A. The exhibition is the first of its kind since Strand’s death in 1976 and shows how the pioneering photographer defined the way fine art and documentary photography is understood and practiced today.

Part of a tour organised by Philadelphia Museum of Art, in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE and made possible by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the V&A exhibition reveals Strand’s trailblazing experiments with abstract photography, screens what is widely thought of as the first avant-garde film and shows the full extent of his photographs made on his global travels beginning in New York in 1910 and ending in France in 1976. Newly acquired photographs from Strand’s only UK project – a 1954 study of the island of South Uist in the Scottish Hebrides – are also on show, alongside other works from the V&A’s own collection.

Paul Strand: Photography and Film for the 20th Century encompasses over 200 objects from exquisite vintage photographic prints to films, books, notebooks, sketches and Strand’s own cameras to trace his career over sixty years. Arranged both chronologically and thematically, the exhibition broadens understanding of Strand as an international photographer and filmmaker with work spanning myriad geographic regions and social and political issues.

Martin Barnes, curator of the exhibition said: “The V&A was one of a handful of UK institutions to collect Paul Strand’s work during his lifetime and the Museum now houses the most extensive collection of his prints in the UK. Through important additional loans, the exhibition explores the life and career of Strand, but also challenges the popular perception of Strand as primarily a photographer of American places and people of the early 20th century.”

The exhibition begins in Strand’s native New York in the 1910s, exploring his early works of its financial district, railyards, wharves and factories. During this time he broke with the soft-focus and Impressionist-inspired ‘Pictorialist’ style of photography to produce among the first abstract pictures made with a camera. The influence of photographic contemporaries Alfred Stieglitz and Alvin Langdon Coburn as well European modern artists such as Braque and Picasso can be seen in Strand’s experiments in this period. On display are early masterpieces such as Wall Street which depicts the anonymity of individuals on their way to work set against the towering architectural geometry and implied economic forces of the modern city. Strand’s early experiments in abstraction, Abstraction, Porch Shadows and White Fence are also shown, alongside candid and anonymous street portraits, such as Blind Woman, made secretly using a camera with a decoy lens.

The exhibition explores Strand’s experiments with the moving image with the film Manhatta (1920-21). A collaboration with the painter and photographer Charles Sheeler, Manhatta was hailed as the first avant-garde film, and traces a day in the life of New York from sunrise to sunset punctuated by lines of Walt Whitman’s poetry. Strand’s embrace of the machine and human form is a key focus of the exhibition. In 1922, he bought an Akeley movie camera. The close-up studies he made of both his first wife Rebecca Salsbury and the Akeley during this time are shown alongside the camera itself. Extracts of Strand’s later, more politicised films, such as Redes (The Wave), made in cooperation with the Mexican government are featured, as well as the scarcely-shown documentary Native Land, a controversial film exposing the violations of America’s workforce.

Strand travelled extensively and the exhibition emphasises his international output from the 1930s to the late 1960s, during which time he collaborated with leading writers to publish a series of photobooks. As Strand’s career progressed, his work became increasingly politicised and focused on a type of social documentary alongside the desire to depict a shared humanity. The exhibition features Strand’s first photobook Time in New England (1950), alongside others including a homage to his adopted home France and his photographic hero Eugène Atget, La France de profil, which he made in collaboration with the French poet, Claude Roy. One of Strand’s most celebrated images, The Family, Luzzara, (The Lusetti’s) was taken in a modest agricultural village in Italy’s Po River valley for the photobook Un Paese, for which he collaborated with the Neo-Realist screen writer, Cesare Zavattini. On display, this hauntingly direct photograph depicts a strong matriarch flanked by her brood of five sons, all living with the aftermath of the Second World War.

From the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, Strand photographed in Egypt, Morocco and Ghana, all of which had gone through transformative political change. The exhibition shows Strand’s most compelling pictures from this period, including his tender portraits, complemented by street pictures showing public meetings and outdoor markets. The exhibition concludes with Strand’s final photographic series exploring his home and garden in Orgeval, France, where he lived with his third wife Hazel until his death in 1976. The images are an intimate counterpoint to Strand’s previous projects and offer a rare glimpse into his own domestic happiness.

Press release from the V&A

Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler
Manhatta
1921
Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive

Fred Zinnemann and Emilio Gómez Muriel (directors)
Paul Strand (photography)
Silvestre Revueltas (music)
Redes / The Wave
1936
Filmada en Alvarado, Veracruz (México)

Paul Strand and Leo Hurwitz (directors)
Paul Strand (photography)
Native Land
1942
VOSE (Tierra Natal)

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
White Fence, Port Kent, New York
1916 (negative); 1945 (print)
© Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Blind Woman, New York
1916
© Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Rebecca, New York
1921
© Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
New Mexico
1930
© Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation

Ahead of the first UK retrospective on Paul Strand in over 40 years, the V&A has acquired nine rare photographs from the pioneering 20th century photographer’s only UK-based series. Taken in 1954 in the Outer Hebrides in Scotland, the photographs document the threat to traditional Gaelic life during the Cold War. The photographs will be unveiled for the first time together as part of the exhibition, Paul Strand: Photography and Film for the 20th Century, opening 19 March.

Paul Strand defined the way fine art and documentary photography is understood and practiced today through his revolutionary experiments with the medium. The major acquisition, purchased for the V&A with the assistance of its Photographs Acquisition Group, comprise an intimate set of nine exquisite black and white vintage prints originally made for Strand’s photobook Tir A’Mhurain (‘Land of Bent Grass’).

A committed Marxist, Strand fled McCarthyism in the U.S. in 1950, pursued by the FBI. He settled in France, and carried out work there and in Italy before arriving on the Hebridean island of South Uist in 1954. Inspired by a BBC radio programme on Gaelic song, and news that the island would become home to a testing range for America’s new nuclear missile, Strand raced to capture the sights, sounds and textures of the place steeped in the threatened traditions of Gaelic language, fishing and agricultural life of pre-Industrial times. The photographs reveal Strand’s meticulous and methodical approach to photography, much like a studio photographer in the open air. They capture not only a pivotal moment in time, but also the end of a particular way of life for the islanders.

The acquisition encompasses four portraits of islanders staring directly at the camera, exuding strength and dignity. Each was photographed in their own environment, usually in or around their home, and is framed by weathered walls, doors or window frames – devices used often by Strand and borrowed from his 19th century photographic heroes David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson. The V&A has also acquired five of Strand’s evocative landscapes, revealing the island’s reliance on the land and sea.

John MacLellan was eight years’ old when he was photographed by Strand with his two sisters for the picture Milly, John and Jean MacLellan, South Uist (below). Of the experience, he said: “I was very young when I met Strand, but I knew he must have been a serious photographer because of the quality of his camera. Me and my sisters were lined up and knew to look at the camera. Looking at the picture, my mother had combed our hair and dressed us in our smartest clothes. I’ve since read that Strand was motivated to take these photographs by the idea that things would change. I know so many people in the photographs, it’s wonderful to be able to look at them now and remember the place I used to call home.”

Martin Barnes, Senior Curator of Photographs at the V&A said: “The photographs made by Strand in the Hebrides are for me a high point in his long and distinguished career. Strand worked slowly yet deliberately and with great poise in his pictures. By this time, his vision for his work had fully matured. His approach to sequencing and editing images in books such as ‘Tir A’Mhurain’ was informed by his collaborative experience making films for over twenty years. The Scottish book contains establishing panoramas of landscapes and the sea, a cast of characters with memorable faces, details of homes and workplaces and close-ups of the rocks, sands and grasses of the natural environment. The accompanying text by Basil Davidson is eloquent and informative about life on the islands, both in the past and at a pivotal time in the 1950s.The whole is a subtle sequence of meditative, revealing pictures and texts that avoid sentimentality and are yet full of empathy. These pictures make a surprising British link with this major American Modernist photographer and will have a satisfying legacy as part of the permanent collection at the V&A.”

Strand is an important figure in the history of photography not only because his career spanned much of the 20th century, but because he relentlessly trialled and pioneered myriad photographic approaches, subjects and technologies. Ironically it was his variety and failure to coin a signature style, and his belief in the integrity of the photographic print as an original artwork, that have seen him increasingly overlooked in the 40 years since his death. The V&A’s exhibition seeks to redress the balance, covering all aspects of Strand’s long career, from his trailblazing experiments in abstraction and dynamic views of New York in the 1910s to his final intimate pictures of his home and garden in France made during the 1970s.

Text from the V&A

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
The Family, Luzzara (The Lusettis)
1953 (negative); mid- to late 1960s (print)
© Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Young Boy, Gondeville, Charente, France
1951 (negative); mid- to late 1960s (print)
© Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Milly, John and Jean MacLellan, South Uist, Hebrides
1954
© Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Milly, John and Jean MacLellan, South Uist, Hebrides (detail)
1954
© Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Angus Peter MacIntyre, South Uist, Hebrides
1954
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
© Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Angus Peter MacIntyre, South Uist, Hebrides (detail)
1954
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
© Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Katie Margaret Mackenzie, Benbecula, Hebrides
1954
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
© Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Katie Margaret Mackenzie, Benbecula, Hebrides (detail)
1954
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
© Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Rock, Loch Eynort, South Uist, Hebrides
1954
Victoria and Albert Museum, Londonn
© Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Tendrils and Sand, South Uist, Hebrides
1954
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
© Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Sea Rocks and Sea, The Atlantic, South Uist, Hebrides
1954
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
© Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
The Road, South Lochboisdale, South Uist, Hebrides
1954
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
© Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Trawler, South Uist, Hebrides
1954
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
© Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation

Martine Franck (Belgian, 1938-2012)
Paul Strand Photographing the Orgeval Garden
1974
© Martine Franck / Magnum Photos

From my mentor and friend Ian Lobb:

“Great camera – very great photographer.

He is making an image – his lower hand is about to go to the shutter button – the lens doesn’t have to be a camera lens, it could be an enlarger lens = note how the lens is tilted slightly forward to extend the depth of field… He has dressed up to take photos!!”

After I questioned holding a camera like this to take a photograph without using a tripod:

“Strand may not be making a picture – he may be just pretending. But he might be shooting @ f4. He might be showing off!!”

Victoria and Albert Museum
Cromwell Road
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Phone: +44 (0)20 7942 2000

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Exhibition: ‘The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook’ at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York

Exhibition dates: 18th April 2012 – 29th April 2013

Josef Albers (German, 1888-1976)
Marli Heimann, Alle während 1 Stunde (Marli Heimann, All During an Hour)
1931
Twelve gelatin silver prints
Overall 11 11/16 x 16 7/16″ (29.7 x 41.8cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of The Josef Albers Foundation, Inc.
© 2012 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Another fascinating exhibition and a bumper posting to boot (pardon the pun!)

A panoply of famous photographers along with a few I had never heard of before (such as Georges Hugnet) are represented in this posting. As the press blurb states, through “key photographic projects, experimental films, and photobooks, The Shaping of New Visions offers a critical reassessment of photography’s role in the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde movements, and in the development of contemporary artistic practices.”

The large exhibition seems to have a finger in every pie, wandering from the birth of the 20th-century modern metropolis, through “New Vision” photography in the 1920s, experimental film, Surrealism, Constructivism and New Objectivity, Dada, Rayographs, photographic avant-gardism, photocollages, photomontages, street photography of the 1960s, colour slide projection performance, through New Topographics, self-published books, and conceptual photography, featuring works that reevaluate the material and contextual definitions of photography. “The final gallery showcases major installations by a younger generation of artists whose works address photography’s role in the construction of contemporary history.”

Without actually going to New York to see the exhibition (I wish!!) – from a distance it does seem a lot of ground to cover within 5 galleries even if there are 250 works. You could say this is a “meta” exhibition, drawing together themes and experiments from different areas of photography with rather a long bow. Have a look at the The Shaping of New Visions exhibition checklist to see the full listing of what’s on show and you be the judge. There are some rare and beautiful images that’s for sure. From the photographs in this posting I would have to say the distorted “eyes” have it…

Dr Marcus Bunyan

.
Many thankx to MoMA for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895-1946)
Ein Lichtspiel: schwarz weiss grau (A Lightplay: Black White Gray) (excerpt)
1930

This short film made by László Moholy-Nagy is based on the shadow patterns created by his Light-Space Modulator, an early kinetic sculpture consisting of a variety of curved objects in a carefully choreographed cycle of movements. Created in 1930, the film was originally planned as the sixth and final part of a much longer work depicting the new space-time.

Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler
Manhatta
1921
Film
Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive

In 1920 Paul Strand and artist Charles Sheeler collaborated on Manhatta, a short silent film that presents a day in the life of lower Manhattan. Inspired by Walt Whitman’s book Leaves of Grass, the film includes multiple segments that express the character of New York. The sequences display a similar approach to the still photography of both artists. Attracted by the cityscape and its visual design, Strand and Sheeler favored extreme camera angles to capture New York’s dynamic qualities. Although influenced by Romanticism in its view of the urban environment, Manhatta is considered the first American avant-garde film.

Dziga Vertov (Russian, 1896-1954)
Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera)
1929
Film
1 hr 6 mins 49 secs

Excerpt from a camera operators diary
ATTENTION VIEWERS:
This film is an experiment in cinematic communication of real events
Without the help of Intertitles
Without the help of a story
Without the help of theatre
This experimental work aims at creating a truly international language of cinema based on its absolute separation from the language of theatre and literature

Eleanor Antin (American, b. 1935)
100 Boots
1971-1973
Photographed by Philip Steinmetz
Halftone reproductions on 51 cards
4 1/2 x 7 in. each
Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York
© Eleanor Antin

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)
Das rechte Auge meiner Tochter Sigrid (The Right Eye of My Daughter Sigrid)
1928
Gelatin silver print
7 1/16 x 9″ (17.9 x 22.9cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of the photographer
© 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Dziga Vertov (Russian, 1896-1954)
Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera) (still)
1929
35mm film
65 min ( black and white, silent)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Department of Film

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Rayograph
1922
Gelatin silver print (photogram)
9 3/8 x 11 3/4″ (23.9 x 29.9cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of James Thrall Soby
© 2012 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

William Klein (American, b. 1928)
Gun, Gun, Gun, New York
1955
Gelatin silver print
10 1/4 x 13 5/8″ (26 x 34.6 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of Arthur and Marilyn Penn

Georges Hugnet (French, 1906-1974)
Untitled [Surrealist beach collage]
c. 1935
Collage of photogravure, lithograph, chromolithograph and gelatin silver prints on gelatin silver print
11 7/8 x 9 7/16″ (30.2 x 24cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of Timothy Baum in memory of Harry H. Lunn, Jr.

Martha Rosler (American, b. 1943)
Red Stripe Kitchen
1967-1972
From the series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful
Pigmented inkjet print, printed 2011
23 3/4 x 18 1/8″ (60.3 x 46cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Purchase and The Modern Women’s Fund

The Museum of Modern Art draws from its collection to present the exhibition The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook on view from April 18, 2012, to April 29, 2013. Filling the third-floor Edward Steichen Photography Galleries, this installation presents more than 250 works by approximately 90 artists, with a focus on new acquisitions and groundbreaking projects by Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Germaine Krull, Dziga Vertov, Gerhard Rühm, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Daido Moriyama, Robert Heinecken, Edward Ruscha, Martha Rosler, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Paul Graham, and The Atlas Group / Walid Raad. The exhibition is organised by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.

Punctuated by key photographic projects, experimental films, and photobooks, The Shaping of New Visions offers a critical reassessment of photography’s role in the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde movements, and in the development of contemporary artistic practices. The shaping of what came to be known as “new vision” photography in the 1920s bore the obvious influence of “lens-based” and “time-based” works. The first gallery begins with photographs capturing the birth of the 20th-century modern metropolis by Berenice Abbott, Edward Steichen, and Alfred Stieglitz, presented next to the avant-garde film Manhatta (1921), a collaboration between Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler.

The 1920s were a period of landmark constructions and scientific discoveries all related to light – from Thomas Edison’s development of incandescent light to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and light speed. Man Ray began experimenting with photograms (pictures made by exposing objects placed on photosensitive paper to light) – which he renamed “rayographs” after himself – in which light was both the subject and medium of his work. This exhibition presents Man Ray’s most exquisite rayographs, alongside his first short experimental film, Le Retour à la raison (Return to Reason, 1923), in which he extended the technique to moving images.

In 1925, two years after he joined the faculty of the Bauhaus school in Weimar Germany, László Moholy-Nagy published his influential book Malerei, Fotografie, Film (Painting, Photography, Film) – part of a series that he coedited with Bauhaus director Walter Gropius – in which he asserted that photography and cinema are heralding a “culture of light” that has overtaken the most innovative aspects of painting. Moholy-Nagy extolled photography and, by extension, film as the quintessential medium of the future. Moholy-Nagy’s interest in the movement of objects and light through space led him to construct Light-Space Modulator, the subject of his only abstract film, Ein Lichtspiel: schwarz weiss grau (A Lightplay: Black White Gray, 1930), which is presented in the exhibition next to his own photographs and those of Florence Henri.

The rise of photographic avant-gardism from the 1920s to the 1940s is traced in the second gallery primarily through the work of European artists. A section on Constructivism and New Objectivity features works by Paul Citroën, Raoul Hausmann, Florence Henri, Germaine Krull, El Lissitzky, Albert Renger-Patzsch, and August Sander. A special focus on Aleksandr Rodchenko underscores his engagement with the illustrated press through collaborations with Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Tretyakov on the covers and layouts of Novyi LEF, the Soviet avant-garde journal of the “Left Front of the Arts,” which popularised the idea of “factography,” or the manufacture of innovative aesthetic facts through photomechanical processes. Alongside Rodchenko, film director Dziga Vertov redefined the medium of still and motion-picture photography with the concept of kino-glaz (cine-eye), according to which the perfectible lens of the camera led to the creation of a novel perception of the world. The exhibition features the final clip of Vertov’s 1929 experimental film Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera), in which the eye is superimposed on the camera lens to form an indivisible apparatus fit to view, process, and convey reality, all at once. This gallery also features a selection of Dada and Surrealist works, including rarely seen photographs, photocollages, and photomontages by Hans Bellmer, Claude Cahun, George Hugnet, André Kertész, Jan Lukas, and Grete Stern, alongside such avant-garde publications as Documents and Littérature.

The third gallery features artists exploring the social world of the postwar period. On view for the first time is a group of erotic and political typo-collages by Gerhard Rühm, a founder of the Wiener Gruppe (1959-1960), an informal group of Vienna-based writers and artists who engaged in radical visual dialogues between pictures and texts. The rebels of street photography – Robert Frank, William Klein, Daido Moriyama, and Garry Winogrand – are represented with a selection of works that refute the then prevailing rules of photography, offering instead elliptical, off-kilter styles that are as personal and controversial as are their unsparing views of postwar society. A highlight of this section is the pioneering slide show Projects: Helen Levitt in Color (1971-1974). Capturing the lively beat, humour, and drama of New York’s street theatre, Levitt’s slide projection is shown for the first time at MoMA since its original presentation at the Museum in 1974.

Photography’s tradition in the postwar period continues in the fourth gallery, which is divided into two sections. One section features “new topographic” works by Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Stephen Shore, and Joel Sternfeld, along with a selection of Edward Ruscha’s self-published books, in which the use of photography as mapmaking signals a conceptual thrust. This section introduces notable works from the 1970s by artists who embraced photography not just as a way of describing experience, but as a conceptual tool. Examples include Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots (1971-1973), Mel Bochner’s Misunderstandings (A theory of photography) (1970), VALIE EXPORT’s Einkreisung (Encirclement) (1976), On Kawara’s I Got Up… (1977), and Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting (1974), all works that reevaluate the material and contextual definitions of photography. The other section features two major and highly experimental recent acquisitions: Martha Rosler’s political magnum opus Bringing the War Home (1967-72), developed in the context of her anti-war and feminist activism, for which the artist spliced together images of domestic bliss clipped from the pages of House Beautiful with grim pictures of the war in Vietnam taken from Life magazine; and Sigmar Polke’s early 1970s experiments with multiple exposures, reversed tonal values, and under-and-over exposures, which underscore the artist’s idea that “a negative is never finished.” The unmistakably cinematic turn that photography takes in the 1980s and early 1990s is represented with a selection of innovative works ranging from Robert Heinecken’s Recto/Verso (1988) to Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s breakthrough Hustler series (1990-92).

The final gallery showcases major installations by a younger generation of artists whose works address photography’s role in the construction of contemporary history. Tapping into forms of archival reconstitution, The Atlas Group / Walid Raad is represented with My Neck Is Thinner Than a Hair: Engines (1996-2004), an installation of 100 pictures of car-bomb blasts in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) that provokes questions about the factual nature of existing records, the traces of war, and the symptoms of trauma. A selection from Harrell Fletcher’s The American War (2005) brings together bootlegged photojournalistic pictures of the U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia, throwing into sharp focus photography’s role as a documentary and propagandistic medium in the shaping of historical memory. Jules Spinatsch’s Panorama: World Economic Forum, Davos (2003), made of thousands of still images and three surveillance video works, chronicles the preparations for the 2003 World Economic Forum, when the entire Davos valley was temporarily transformed into a high security zone. A selection of Paul Graham’s photographs from his major photobook project a shimmer of possibility (2007), consisting of filmic haikus about everyday life in today’s America, concludes the exhibition.

Press release from the MoMA website

On Kawara (Japanese, 1932-2014)
I Got Up At…
1974-1975
(Ninety postcards with printed rubber stamps)

The semi autobiographical I Got Up At… by On Kawara is a series of postcards sent to John Baldessari. Each card was sent from his location that morning detailing the time he got up. The time marked on each card varies drastically from day to day, the time stamped on each card is the time he left his bed as opposed to actually waking up. Kawara’s work often acts to document his existence in time, giving a material form to which is formally immaterial. The series has been repeated frequently sending the cards to a variety of friends and colleagues.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia (American, b. 1951)
Marilyn; 28 Years Old; Las Vegas, Nevada; $30
1990-1992
Chromogenic colour print
24 x 35 15/16″ (61 x 91.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
E.T. Harmax Foundation Fund
© 2012 Philip-Lorca diCorcia, courtesy David Zwirner, New York

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
Projects: Helen Levitt in Color (detail)
1971-1974
40 colour slides shown in continuous projection
Originally presented at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 26-October 20, 1974

Atlas Group, Walid Raad
My Neck is Thinner Than a Hair: Engines (detail)
1996-2004
100 pigmented inkjet prints
9 7/16 x 13 3/8″ (24 x 34cm) each
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Fund for the Twenty-First Century

Daido Moriyama (Japanese, b. 1938)
Entertainer on Stage, Shimizu
1967
Gelatin silver print
18 7/8 x 28″ (48.0 x 71.2cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of the photographer
© 2012 Daido Moriyama

VALIE EXPORT (Austrian, b. 1940)
Einkreisung (Encirclement)
1976
From the series Körperkonfigurationen (Body Configurations)
Gelatin silver print with red ink
14 x 23 7/16″ (35.5 x 59.6cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Carl Jacobs Fund
© 2012 VALIE EXPORT / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VBK, Austria

Grete Stern (German-Argentinian, 1904-1999)
No. 1 from the series Sueños (Dreams)
1949
Gelatin silver print
10 1/2 x 9″ (26.6 x 22.9cm)
Latin American and Caribbean Fund through gift of Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis in honor of Adriana Cisneros de Griffin
© 2012 Horacio Coppola

Sigmar Polke (German, 1941-2010)
Untitled (Mariette Althaus)
c. 1975
Gelatin silver print (red toned)
9 1/4 x 11 13/16″ (23.5 x 30cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Acquired through the generosity of Edgar Wachenheim III and Ronald S. Lauder
© 2012 Estate of Sigmar Polke / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany

Martha Rosler (American, b. 1943)
Hands Up / Makeup
1967-1972
From the series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful
Pigmented inkjet print, printed 2011
23 3/4 x 13 15/16″ (60.4 x 35.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Purchase and The Modern Women’s Fund
© 2012 Martha Rosler

Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006)
Recto/Verso #2
1988
Silver dye bleach print
8 5/8 x 7 7/8″ (21.9 x 20cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Mr. and Mrs. Clark Winter Fund
© 2012 The Robert Heinecken Trust

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman
Negative c. 1930/Distortion c. 1950
Gelatin silver print
12 3/4 x 10 1/8″ (32.6 x 25.7cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Frances Keech Fund in honor of Monroe Wheeler
© 2012 Berenice Abbott/Commerce Graphics

Raoul Hausmann (Austrian, 1886-1971)
Untitled
February 1931
Gelatin silver print
5 3/8 x 4 7/16″ (13.6 x 11.2cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Thomas Walther Collection Gift of Thomas Walther
© 2012 Raoul Hausmann / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954)
Untitled
c. 1928
Gelatin silver print
4 9/16 x 3 1/2″ (10 x 7.6cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Purchase and anonymous promised gift
© 2012 Estate of Claude Cahun

Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956)
Sovetskoe foto (Soviet Photo) No. 10
October 1927
Letterpress
10 3/8 x 7 1/4″ (26.3 x 18.4cm)
Publisher: Ogonek, Moscow
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation

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