MEDITATIONS AROUND PAUL STRAND
They say that we Photographers are a blind race at best; that we learn to look at even the prettiest faces as so much light and shade; that we seldom admire, and never love. This is a delusion I long to break through. . . .
—Lewis Carroll, 1860
IS STILL PHOTOGRAPHY FATED TO wrestle forever with its immemorial troubles?
A year ago, a student of mine explained, with great agitation, why she was giving it all up: there was “no history of thought” in photography, but only a “history of things.” During 130 years of copious activity, photographers had produced no tradition, that is, no body of work that deliberately extends its perceptual resonance beyond the boundaries of individual sensibility. Instead, there was a series of monuments, mutually isolated accumulations of “precious objects,” personal styles more or less indistinctly differentiated from the general mass of photographic images generated “by our culture, not by artists,” from motives merely illustrative or journalistic.
Furthermore, every single photographer had somehow, for himself, to exorcise the twin devils of painting and the graphic arts: there was, seemingly, no way for photography to cleanse its house. Master and journeyman alike had to face down, in a kind of frozen Gethsemane, the specter of the plastic arts. She had wearied of it.
Twelve years before, less than certain of an alternative, I had wearied too. So I baited her, and listened. What would she do? Why not embrace the monster, and paint? “Good God, no,” she answered, “that would be even worse!”
There was only one thing to do: she would make films. And then: “What I mean is, films are made for the mind; photographs seem to be only for the eye.”
And again: “Anyway, all photographs are beginning to look alike to me, like pages of prose in a book.” Did I know what she meant?
She meant that they all “looked as if they had been made by the same person.”
If 20th-century American photography has given us as many as three grandmasters, undisputed by virtue of their energy, seniority, and bulk of coherent oeuvre, then their names must be Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Edward Weston. The first and last are gone; Strand alone, Homerically, survives.
Stieglitz, an evidently volcanic figure whose precise mass has never been rigorously assayed, was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1864; he was Paul Strand’s mentor (so says Strand) and died in 1946. The transplanted Californian, Weston, born in 1886 (between Pound and Eliot), was confirmed in his true vocation during a 1920 visit to New York, in the heyday of Camera Work and “291,” where he saw photographs by Stieglitz and Strand, and met both. Weston died on New Year’s Day, 1958.
It is scarcely necessary to point out that exhaustive examination is decades overdue for all three of these men.
Mercifully, we are given, for the first time since his 1945 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, just such a view of the whole work of Paul Strand, in a really massive exhibition originating at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (During the next three years, the photographs will travel to five other museums in the United States.) There are nearly 500 prints, together with the films1 for which Strand must bear crucial esthetic responsibility.
The show is accompanied by the publication of Paul Strand/A Retrospective Monograph/The Years 1915–68. This is not the usual small souvenir catalogue, but a large quarto volume of nearly 400 pages which contains, along with biographical and bibliographical material, and a systematic nuggeting of texts by and about Strand, impeccably acceptable reproductions of more than half of the photographs in the show.
Paul Strand himself supervised in detail the installation of the show and the design of the book. The results of both efforts vary from ordinary expectation in ways that illuminate Strand’s convictions on the nature and cultural meaning of photographic images.
So I shall have to examine their suggestions at some length, and also take up, along the way, some fundamental problems implied by photographs at large.
To begin with: the word “retrospective” is sufficiently misleading, in this case, to suggest important dissociations. Nearly all the prints in the show are new, made and matched especially for the occasion. (Consider, for a moment, the unimaginable parallel case in painting!)
What Strand has actually made, during 53 years, is a large number of negatives.
The negative has somewhat the same relation to the photographic print as the block has to the woodcut, with the important difference that the curatorial notion of “states” does not apply to photographs. That is, the graphic artist’s plate suffers gradual attrition during’ the pulling process, whereas a virtually infinite number of prints may be generated from the information stabilized in a single negative.
But the photographic result is no more fixed or automatic than the graphic. In the hands of a gifted and able printer (and Strand is supremely both) a single negative may be made to yield prints of the most extraordinary variety. I would compare the process to that of deciphering the figured basses in baroque keyboard works: given a sufficiently wide rhetorical field to work in, there must finally obtain the possibility of shifting a whole work from one to another mutually contradictory emotional locus by the variation of a single element.
I seem to be speaking, of course, of what has been derogated as nuance; and there is a strain in the temper of modern art that has, quite rightly I think, found suspect any tendency to locate the qualities of art works outside the direct conceptual responsibility of the artist, in “performance” or “interpretive” values. But for Strand (himself the craftsman-performer of his stock of negatives) such concerns amount, as we shall see, to very much of his art.
Nuance is a superficial matter. But photographs are, in the precise sense, perfectly superficial: they have as yet no insides, it would seem, either in themselves or inside us, for we are accustomed to deny them, in their exfoliation of illusion, the very richness of implication that for the accultured intellect is the only way at all we have left us to understand (for instance) paintings.
To put it quite simply, a painting which may be after all, “nothing but some paint splashed on canvas,” is comprehended within an enormity which includes not only all the paintings that have ever been made, but also all that has ever been attributed to the painterly act, seen as abundant metaphor for one sort of relationship between the making intelligence and its sensed exterior reality. The “art of painting” seems larger than any of its subgestures (“paintings”), protecting, justifying, and itself protected and justified as a grand gesture within the humane category “making.”
Contrariwise, photography seems to begin and end with its every photograph. The image and its pretext (the “portrait” and the “face,” which bear to one another the relationship called “likeness”) are ontologically manacled together. Every discrete phenomenon has its corresponding photograph, every photograph its peculiar “subject”; and after little more than a century, the whole visible cosmos seems about to transform itself into a gigantic whirling rebus within which all things cast off scores of approximate apparitions, which turn again to devour and, finally, replace them.
We are so accustomed to the dialectics of 20th-century painting and sculpture, that we are led to suppose this condition is a sorrow from which photographers hope for surcease. But this simply is not true, on balance; and most certainly not in Strand’s case. Rather, a stratagem by no means peculiar to Strand, but detectable in the work and published remarks of photographers in every generation since Stieglitz, has consisted in insisting (with considerable passion) upon the primacy of photography’s illusions and simultaneously, upon the autonomy of the photographic artifact itself.
The larger esthetic thrust of photography has concentrated, not upon annihilating this contradiction, as painting seems always to verge upon doing, but instead upon containing it: since the West is still largely populated by closet Aristotelians, we are far from inheriting all the wealth that may be born to the mind in entertaining, equidistant from a plane of contemplative fusion, two such evidently antagonistic propositions. However, in photography the paradox lies at the very core of the art, refusing to be purged.
For Paul Strand, both theses interlace and are succinctly bracketed in a single notion: Craft. For it is by craft that illusion reaches its most intense conviction, and by craft also that the photograph is disintricated from other visible made things, through regard for the inherent qualities of photographic materials and processes. Craft is, moreover, a complex gesture, which begins with a formal conception and precipitates in the print.
So we return to the exhibition: hundreds of such precipitate.
YET I SHOULD LIKE TO PURSUE this matter of photographic prints into still further distinctions, since they are, after all, the only evidence we have.
Let us suppose, for a moment, that every work of art consists of two parts: a deliberative structure, and an axiomatic substructure. The structure is what is apparent, that is, the denumerable field of elements and operations that constitute the permanent artifact of record. Barring corruption by moth and rust, it is immutable—and of course it is here that art, curiously, used to spend so much of its energy, in consolidating physical stability.
The substructure consists of everything the artist considered too obvious to bother himself about—or, often enough did not consider at all, but had handed him by his culture or tradition. Axioms are eternal verities—subject, as we have begun to see, to change on very short notice.
There was a time, when art concerned itself with’ its structure merely: what art itself was seemed clear enough. That every single work of art assumes an entire cosmology and implies an entire epistemology (I take it this is the Goldbach’s Theorom of analytic criticism) had occurred to no one. And they called it the Golden Age.
We are accustomed to examine the axiomatic assumptions of any work of art (or of anything else)—to examine its substructure, in short, in stereoscopic focus with its structure. The tendency to do so is what makes us (for serious lack of a better term) “modern.” The utter concentration of attention upon what is “assumed,” upon the root necessity of an art, is called radicalism.
Photography came in 1839 into an axiomatic climate of utmost certainty. What art was, and what it was for, were known. The photograph simply inherited the current axioms of painting. It became a quick and easy method for meeting most of the conditions prescribed for the art object: it “imitated,” according to the strangulated contemporary understanding of that verb. By the 1890s, painting had begun to examine its own assumptions and bequeath those it discarded to the photograph, which had long since bifurcated: there was the photographic “record,” and then there was photographic Art. The former went its own way; the latter imitated currently fashionable (not radical) painting.
Enter Stieglitz, who came, in time, to sense that the photograph merited at least a generic substructure of its own—whose reflex sympathies (he had been trained as a photoengraver) moved him eventually to choose the alternate pathway, the photograph that, if it had not repudiated the assumptions of art, was at least indifferent to them. At this remove, many of Stieglitz’ prints still look suspiciously like art, but his Steerage remains a talisman as acute as any in photography. He was an able polemicist, and “291” was a sure and defensible critical act—but he was not a particularly nimble or fervid theorist.
Enter Paul Strand, a man very much younger, of drastically different temper. It must be admitted that some of his earliest work also looks like art, and moreover like modern art. But it is quite clear from his photographs and from his early writing2 that he saw, instantly:
1. photography must separate itself immediately from painting and the graphic arts;
2. the separation must be based upon sensible axiomatic differences directly related to illusion;
3. photography must insist upon the special materiality of its own process.
It is easy enough to assent to all this, although the arguments were certainly fresher in those days, and their paragraphs more open to the mysterious options of self-cancellation. But then—indistinctly (and three generations later, they still are not wholly focused)—come intimations of a novel insight.
If I read Strand correctly, his reasoning (in my own terms) runs thus:
A. The structure of the photographic image is wedded absolutely to illusion. As photographers, we are committed to the utmost fidelity of spacial and tactile illusion.
B. Mais d’abord, it faut être poète. No two men, however perfect their illusionary craft, make commensurable photographs from the same pretext.
C. These differences must somehow be accounted for. So they must lie within the substructure of the work, that is, among its cosmological and epistemological assumptions.
D. Therefore, every parameter of the photographic process (“. . . form, texture, line, and even print color . . . .”) directly implies, and defines, a view of reality and of knowledge.
In so conceiving the structure of a work as entirely “given,” and locating all control in its axiomatic substructure, Strand originates an inversion of (Romantic) values that is still in the process of assimilation. To the sensibility oriented towards painting, quite extreme parametric variations on a single photographic image must seem no more than pointlessly variant “treatments” of an icon. But to any mind committed to the paradoxical illusions of the photographic image, the least discernible modification (from a conventionalized norm) of contrast or tonality must be violently charged with significance, for it implies a changed view of the universe, and a suitably adjusted theory of knowledge.
In cleaving thus to sensory données, the photographer suggests a drastically altered view of the artist’s role. The received postures of Spirit Medium and Maker nearly disappear. On the deliberative level, the artist becomes a researcher, a gatherer of facts, like Confucius’ ancients, who, desiring Wisdom, “sought first to extend their knowledge of particularities to the uttermost.” And on the axiomatic level, where the real work is now to be done, the artist is an epistemologist.
The quest for nominally perfect fidelity to spatial and tactile illusion excludes the very concept of style as irrelevant; and “development,” within the lifework of one man, yields to increasingly exhaustive rigor of Archimedean approximation. (In portraiture, for example, expression is to be avoided, for it must necessarily interfere with the study of physiognomy.) Ideally, the fully disciplined artist should be able to visit the same site on two occasions decades apart and return with identical images.
Carried to its logical outcome, the ambition of this activity can amount to nothing less than the systematic recording of the whole visible world, with a view to its entire comprehension. And that is a sober enterprise indeed.
Thus the importance for Strand of what he calls “craftsmanship,” and thus also the importance of the print. In reprinting nearly every photograph for the present exhibition, Strand is conforming the investigations of a lifetime to his current (presumably mature and perfected) view of the world. So that this retrospective view of his work is not for us, the “visitors,” alone; it is not even primarily ours, for we have never seen the prints he made in 1916 from the negatives of that year. Nevertheless, he holds them in his own mind; this retrospective is for Strand himself.
All the photographs are hung, in single or double rows, at about eye level. They are presented with the most severe uniformity, in wide white mattes, behind glass, in narrow white frames. The gallery walls are white. There are no captions or dates, but only the most unobtrusive small numbers, and these do not run serially. The prints are not arranged chronologically. The treatment is reminiscent of microscope slides—somewhat disordered cross sections from the tesseract of Strand’s sensibility—or criminological photographs from old Bertillon files.
Most of the prints fall within the bounds of 8 by 10 inch paper, although a very few go to 11 by 14 and a few more are smaller. Strand seems indifferent, but hardly insensible, to classic prohibitions against cropping. A small number of prints are toned: I assume these are the oldest in the show. Occasional prints are extremely grainy: that the superimposed syntax of grain is “admissible” is surprising.
With a single exception, Strand appears to accept the standard painterly categories of portrait, landscape, still life, abstraction (the latter remains strictly referential, and is achieved through extreme close-up and adroit cropping, a familiar device of which Strand is co-originator). Each category is dealt with from a few carefully standardized points of view. Landscapes, seldom peopled, are of two sorts: a wide panorama, on the one hand, and on the other—where there are man-made structures—a near middle distance characterized by flattened, geometric frontality and extremely delicate attention to the boundaries of the image-rectangle. Portraits are mostly frontal, posed. They are Roman busts. (But there are a few full-lengths, and an extensive subset of heads.) There are few interior architectural spaces but a relative abundance of exterior architectural detail, very often carved wood or stonework related to Christian iconography. Images of animals are rare,- and then most often parenthetical: friends who have spent time (and have themselves photographed) in Mexico, Mediterranean Europe, and Africa, have commented upon this with amazement.
Finally, there is one category entirely missing: the nude. There simply are not any images of the nude human figure at all. And then, as if to underscore deliberately the omission, one is obliged to reckon with. the presence, on loan from Strand’s private collection, of a quarter-scale bronze sculptured nude by Gaston Lachaise, long a close personal friend of the photographer. I am constrained to consider what Strand has in fact done—and not what he has omitted or avoided doing—but I cannot help but record my absolute astonishment at this; it is a lacuna which contradicts much that I had divined of Strand’s esthetic, for there is nothing elsewhere, in either his work or his writing, which suggests that anything under the sun might be exempt from the scrutiny of his lens.
I have said that the ordering of photographs, in both the show and its strictly parallel monograph, pointedly avoids both chronology and titling. Nonetheless, there is a principle of organization.
The small numbers on the mattes refer us to placards, posted occasionally throughout the exhibition space, which describe each image by title (when there is one)—and always by date and locale. And it is by locale, in fact, that the prints are sorted. Strand has returned often to his accustomed sites, and two adjacent photographs from Vermont, for example, may be dated 30 or 40 years apart.) (Predictably, they differ from one another no more than they might if made on consecutive days.) The photographer, if he could go on working for a few more millennia, might photograph the whole terrain of the world; the local human fauna seem almost excrescences, albeit absorbing ones, of the landscape and local architecture.
The barest attempt to reconstruct a diachrony meets with the photographer’s implicit reproof: information is never withheld, but it is made effectively inaccessible, since its pursuit necessitates endless trips from photograph to identifying legend and back again. The meaning is quite clear. Still photography has, through one and another stratagem, learned to suspend or encode all but one of our incessant intuitions: I refer to what we call time. Paul Strand seems consciously intent, in his presentation of his work as in the work itself, on refuting time. It seems distinctly forbidden that the problem shall ever arise.
*
Paul Strand’s work has been praised by everyone who has ever written about it, and I will not presume to praise it further. It has been called everything. Stieglitz called it “pure,” and thereby perhaps founded our abuse of that adjective; others have called it “brutal” and “elegant” (though it is curious that no one person has thought it both). But I should like to say something about the residue of feeling I am left with, at the brief remove of three weeks: the entire exhibition rhymes perfectly twice with every photograph in it: once, in its almost unbearably sumptuous appearance—and again, in the exquisite chastity of its assumptions.
Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.
—Jorge Luis Borges
—Hollis Frampton
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NOTES
1. Strand has been a professional cameraman for a large part of his adult life, and so has probably shot scores of films. I refer only to: Manahatta, 1921 (with Charles Sheeler; Redes, 1933; The Plow That Broke the Plains, 1935 (directed by Paré Lorentz); Native Land, 1942.
2. Three early essays contain, as it were, the Analects of Paul Strand; later items in his bibliography do not modify appreciably the views expressed in: “Photography,” Seven Arts, August, 1917, pp. 524–26. “Photography and the New God,” Broom, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1922, pp. 252–58. “The Art Motive in Photography,” The British Journal of Photography, Vol. 70, 1923, pp. 612–15.
