Paul Strand’s basic idea never changed throughout his photographic career. Starting with his early, slightly out-of-focus 1916 prints to his much later views in "Time in New England" as well as his huge collection of portraits, his underlying theme has always been to connect.
Photography is a visual medium. But modern artists have a tradition of cross-referencing the sensations – known as synaesthesia. The most famous being Scriabin's Clavier a Lumières. He worked out a system of 'playing' colored lights with the keys of the piano where certain notes would cause certian colored lights to project, thus merging visual and aural experiences. Many other examples abound of artists describing colors that elicit tastes, and sounds that conjure up smells.
The sensation of touch is the least openly discussed of the modern artists' exploration of synaesthesia. Perhaps it is the most sublime or subconscious. And the most personal. It is easier to talk about more distant ideas like the color of sounds or the taste of shapes. To incorporate touch into one's art, both as a physical act and an emotional condition, suggests a vulnerability and a lack or human associations. It no longer becomes an idea, but a necessity.
I believe this is where modern art makes one of its most hidden contributions. When perspective and depth, refined in the Renaissance painters (but still present in some form before this geometric discovery), was slowly removed from the artist's technique, the canvass or the surface started to take on an important role. The surface, which started to become so important with the early modernists, continues to be so even today.
Many modern artists talk about the material or the medium (the paint, the canvass, the paper) of their art as having equal importance as the colors, forms, concepts and any other dimensions that helped them complete the piece. Modern painters often evoke the surface of their canvass by adding layers of paint to distort the smoothness of the painting and to encourage us to touch these hanging pieces of sculptured paint. This exploration of the surface, both for the artist and the viewer, becomes an important part of the piece.
We see this reliance on surface in Strand's earliest photographs. His 1916 "Chicken: Twin Lakes, Connecticut" achieves this by the slightly out-of-focus, grainy quality of his print where the softened surface and tiny spots provides a textural as well as a visual effect. The photograph is also flattened, with no clear perspective, and the chicken dotted around as though patterns on a flat piece of cloth.
His later abstracted - but still recognizable - works appear to lose this soft, dusty effect with their clean-cut and sharply focused prints. Yet, they too are very much concerned with the surface. Under the influence of the cubists, Strand would start to experiment with the geometric shapes that so befitted the angular buildings and streets of his New York series. As in his 1915 "Wall Street" shows, he is using pure basic shapes of rectangles and straight lines (with his famous angled shots) to lead us into abstraction. His shadowy people act more as linear props than human characters. "City Hall Park" is still using formal structures with the curves and weaves of the linear footpath, and the more willowy human figures. This would finally lead to his almost unrecognizable "Chair Abstraction" in 1916.
But we shouldn't be deceived by these dehumanized figures and distorted daily objects. Although they do play a structural role in his photographs, the whole exercise is still about touch. The geometry and scattered patterns once again flatten the image, guiding us to explore the surface (and touch it if the museum wardens would let us), rather subsume us deeper into the picture.
All these ideas, I believe, lead to Strand's most beautiful work: "Time in New England". Its themes, the most important of which I think is connecting with America, can be glimpsed in this 1916 precursor "White Fence" shot in Port Kent, New York. Besides the iconic image of the idealized American fence, this is a photograph of pure geometrics. Rhythms and basic shapes (squares and rectangles) dominate to give us once again that disconcerting flatness where we expect conventional perspective. We are invited to connect with, touch, this image of an American landscape.
Strand’s "Time in New England" was part of his life-long interest in taking pictures of specific locations. He was an avid traveler and took photographs in nearby Mexico and Quebec and as far afield as Morocco and Ghana. Yet "Time in New England" touches us the most. After all, it is his home. It is America. These were the years when he was concerned for his America out in the war fronts in Europe as by what was happening (in his views) internally. He had just completed "Native Land"; his patriotic documentary. “I wanted to look with vivid and intimate clarity into the past” says Strand in "Time in New England". All the more need to connect with those things that appeared to have been lost and bring them back to the surface, and to the present.
His most memorable photograph in this series is plainly titled “Church” which he took in Vermont in 1946. Once again, it appears to be a simplistic view of a quintessential American landscape – the plain New England wooden colonial Church. One can now call it iconic. It seems at though Strand were physically constructing this little church by placing the basic shapes – squares, triangles, the tiny circular window and even the swirls of clouds and scrawled of branches - directly onto the photographic paper. Perhaps it is something he wishes he could actually do, rather than click the aperture and make such a quick reproduction without contact with the parts.
We are also made to feel as though we could pick up these pieces of plank and build our own version, reuniting us with the pioneers who sawed and nailed the wood with their own bare hands. The rhythmic repetition of the horizontal planks provide a roughened texture to be stroked, much like a piece of fabric made out of coarse wool or flaxen. The distorted angle reminds us that we’re looking at a recreated structure, refusing us a suspension of disbelief that a perfected, right-angled building would induce. We are looking at, rather than into, this photograph. Finally, the croppings on the side and on top are an invitation for us to complete the picture, in our computer screens, in our own imagination or into our living rooms. Strand’s pictorial guides encourage us to be part of this picture, to touch it and connect with it, and to reach back into history and perhaps feel the energy and effort put by the plain folk who made this historic contribution. We have touched them, and Strand has touched us.
References:
Paul Strand. Time in New England: Photos.Text selected and edited by Nancy Newhall. New York : Aperture, 1980.
Robert Adams. Why people photograph : selected essays and reviews. New York : Aperture, 1994.