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| Paul Strand - Wall Street, New York, 1915 |
Opening March 7 Fotomuseum Winterthur presents the first major
retrospective in Europe of the work of Paul Strand (1890–1976), one of
the great photographers of the twentieth century. The exhibition reveals
the multiplicity of his practice, from his early efforts to secure
photography’s position as a modernist art form, to his embrace of
film-making, to his important post-war photo books. Strand is revealed
as a complex and contradictory figure: a stubborn aesthete, a communist
sympathiser and a pastoralist motivated by a strong sense of social
purpose.
The exhibition begins with Strand’s rapid mastery of
the prevailing avant-garde styles of the 1910s and his growing interest
in urban subject matter, including a series of innovative close-up
portraits of people taken on the streets of New York. Strand’s sense of
modernity was informed by extensive travel and between 1932 and 1934 he
photographed in Mexico, deepening his engagement with the politics of
the left. Deeply affected by the world economic crisis of the 1930s,
Strand took an increasing interest in film-making as a means of
encouraging social change. Films such as Redes (1936) and Native Land
(1942) reveal the extent of his political commitments. After 1945,
Strand devoted his energies primarily to the production of photo books,
offering him the opportunity to create complex portraits of people and
place. The exhibition concentrates on three of his most important
productions, including his portrait of the Italian village of Luzzara,
published as Un Paese in 1955. Concentrating on the lives of
ordinary people, Strand’s photography provides a moving testimony to the
democratic qualities of everyday life.
The exhibition is organised by the Philadelphia
Museum of Art in collaboration with the Fundación MAPFRE. It is
accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue co-published by the
Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Press in collaboration
with the Fundación MAPFRE.
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| Paul Strand - White Fence, Port Kent, New York,1916 |
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