Paul Strand: Master of Modern Photography
04/06/2015.
Exhibition of Paul Strand [MAD] Spain, 3.06 >23.08.2015
metalocus, CELIA RODRÍGUEZ
metalocus, CELIA RODRÍGUEZ
FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE is now presenting the work of another great master of photography. This exhibition also constitutes a focus on our own collections, given that since 2011 we are in possession of more than 100 photographs by Paul Strand, most of them vintage prints. As such, we are the European institution that houses the largest and most varied collection of works by this photographer. The exhibition spans the six decades of Strand’s artistic activities, analysing his most important works through some of the finest existing prints. This is the history of photography through a gaze.
1. From pictorialism to Modernity
The exhibition opens with Strand’s earliest works produced in the second decade of the century, which reveal his rapid mastery of the prevailing Pictorialist style. In 1915 he reassessed his experience to date, moving away from Pictorialist content and compositions in order to take photographs that capture the energy and movement of the city.
Fascinated by avant-garde art, during these years Strand focused on the representation of abstraction through everyday objects, most of them photographed in rural Connecticut. He set out to discover the effect of a distinguishable object represented solely through its lines and curves, which he treated as individual elements.
“In life it is evident that there are no such thing as ‘representation’ in itself and that ‘abstraction’ is merely quantitative extension or simplification, not necessarily more potent in the perception of objectivity. […] There is only the possibility of limitless individualized combinations related to experience.”
2. From Stieglitz's circle to portraits of the community
This section starts in the 1920s and is devoted to a period when Strand became fascinated by the potential of the large-format camera, its increase in clarity and greater detail allowing him to change his concept of how to capture images.
“(Cameras) seemed not only useful, but beautiful to me. I tried to photograph the power and fascinating precision of their own functionality as machines, their surfaces and lines”
3. Images of History and Modernity
The exhibition highlights mainly three of these projects through which we can better understand the artist's approach to these places and cultures: New England (1950), which draws on its cultural history to convey the idea of past and present that suggests an incessant struggle for democracy and individual freedom; Luzzara (1953), where he directs his attention to the daily realities of a northern town recovering from the miseries of war and fascism and Ghana (1963), until his later years where Strand draws attention to the countless discoveries in his garden.
Curator.-Peter Barberie, exhibition's curator of Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Dates.- 3 de junio-23 de agosto
Venue.- Showroom Bárbara de Braganza. Bárbara st de Braganza, 13, Madrid, 28004, Spain.
Paul Strand was born in New York City on October 16, 1890. In his late teens Strand was a student of renowned documentary photographer Lewis Hine at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. Paul Strand began photographing in New York in the 1910s. During the early 1920s he received recognition for both his painting and his photography. Some of this early work, like the well-known "Wall Street," experimented with formal abstractions (influencing, among others, Edward Hopper and his idiosyncratic urban vision). Other of Strand's works reflect his interest in using the camera as a tool for social reform. He was one of the founders of the Photo League, an association of photographers who advocated using their art to promote social and political causes. He visited New Mexico in 1926 and, beginning in 1930. It was there, amidst a community of visual artists and writers, that Strand began to develop his belief in the humanistic value of portraiture.
In June 1949, Strand left the United States to present Native Land at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in Czechoslovakia. The remaining 27 years of his life were spent in Orgeval, France where, despite never learning the language, he maintained an impressive creative life, assisted by his third wife, fellow photographer Hazel Kingsbury Strand.
Although Strand is best known for his early abstractions, his return to still photography in this later period produced some of his most significant work in the form of six book ‘portraits’ of place: Time in New England (1950), La France de Profil (1952), Un Paese (featuring photographs of Luzzara and the Po River Valley in Italy, 1955), Tir a'Mhurain / Outer Hebrides (1962), Living Egypt (1969) and Ghana: an African portrait (1976).