After taking Stieglitz’s advice to heart over the next months, Strand was astounded by the older man’s reaction on his return to 291 that summer with his latest work, including some sharply focused prints of New York that captured the city’s dynamism. “You’ve done something new for photography,” Stieglitz declared. “I’ll give you an exhibition and I want to put them in Camera Work.” He added, “‘291’ is your place too, you belong here. Come in whenever you want.” It would be hard to overestimate the importance of that day for the normally reserved young man: “It was like having the world handed to you on a platter.”
It was also a significant day for Stieglitz. For some time he had been despondent about the “lost” members of his entourage and the accusation by de Zayas and Picabia that he was failing to nourish the next generation of American artists. Strand was twenty-four and Stieglitz fifty-one when they met again in the summer of 1915. Sensing the potential in Strand’s work, Stieglitz welcomed him as the man most likely to follow in his footsteps, the first and most talented of 291’s “children.”
* * *
. . .
Paul Strand was born in 1890 into a middle-class Jewish family that had lived in New York since the 1840s. His parents, Jacob and Matilda Stransky, had changed their name to Strand when their first and only child was born; three years later, they settled with Paul’s maternal grandparents and aunt in the brownstone on West Eighty-third Street where he would live for the next forty years. Strand never forgot that the building was owned by his uncle, Nathaniel Myers, a wealthy lawyer who paid for their summer vacations and other advantages, such as cameras. The Strands were, he reflected, “not a very well-to-do family” who lived rent-free. “The rest was up to my father and my little aunt who taught kindergarten.”
Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, 1917
Growing up in a household dominated by women, Paul was especially fond of his father—who supported his artistic leanings, although it was unclear how he would earn a living—but Jacob was often away on business (he sold French clocks and German enamelware). Paul’s mother had not wanted a child, he believed; she became an invalid after his birth. He was closer to his aunts, Frances Arnstein, who was active in the reform-era kindergarten movement, and Josie Arnstein Myers, who had no children of her own.
The family gathered on Sundays at the Myerses’ house but rarely attended synagogue. They held humanistic views emphasizing social progress, a deethnicized form of Judaism shared by many German-Jewish New Yorkers who saw in the Ethical Culture Movement an alternative to Orthodoxy. Paul attended public school and played with the local boys until his father learned that their pastimes included breaking windows. He was transferred to the Ethical Culture School on Sixty-third Street and Central Park West, where he would, presumably, find a better class of playmate.
ECS, as the school was called, had been founded in 1878 as a society for workingmen. When Paul enrolled in 1904, the student body was mainly middle-class; the curriculum included courses in the crafts (printing, carpentry, and soon, photography) as well as more traditional subjects. The teaching staff included figures from the art world. In his teens, Paul studied with both Charles Caffin and Lewis Hine, who emphasized the use of the camera as a tool of social reform. Hine’s camera club became Paul’s refuge. His dream of being a photographer crystallized when Hine took its members to 291 and invited Stieglitz to show at the school. (Strand wrote in the ECS alumni bulletin, “The exhibition by Alfred Stieglitz held at the School, and Mr. Hine’s class in photography were the start in directing my attention to photography as a profession.”)
Despite these auspicious beginnings, Strand believed that his development had been impeded by his family’s finances: “I had to, myself, face the problem of being a wage earner as soon as I left high school.” After graduating in 1909, he worked for his father and spent his spare hours at the Camera Club, which he joined the year that the trustees moved to expel Stieglitz. Strand espoused the pictorialist aesthetic in vogue there rather than the reform spirit of Hine, who had already begun work as an investigative photographer documenting the abuse of child laborers.
In those years, Strand adopted the soft-focus lens and preindustrialist subjects favored by Stieglitz’s former colleagues Käsebier and White. Under their tutelage, he became an adept practitioner of the craft, softening his prints by painting them with gum bichromate. His portrait of Matilda Strand was displayed in the club’s exhibition in 1910; his Garden of Dreams, taken at Versailles during his trip to Europe in 1911, won prizes at the club’s annual show. A critic has written, “The picture filled all the unstated requirements for a prizewinner on this circuit: it was handsome and related to great art (Corot, Versailles) and quite empty (while seeming not to be)…”
The young man was puzzled by the work he saw at the Armory Show. “I had a feeling that something very important was happening, and I wanted to know more about it,” he recalled. Studying Cézanne, Picasso, Picabia, and Duchamp, Strand decided that they had turned their backs on representation in order to experiment, to perform a kind of research. “I like the word research,” he said years later. “I think the artist and the scientist are related.” What was more, hostility to these progressive artists came from the same source as the art establishment’s resistance to photography: “There was a fight going on for the integrity of a new medium and its right to exist, the right of the photographer to be an artist, as well as the right of Picasso and other artists to do the kind of work they were doing.” He felt ready to join the cause.
In these years, Strand earned a modest income by taking pictures on college campuses to sell as souvenirs, a practice he continued on his travels around the country in 1915. The scheme was not profitable, but it allowed him to photograph sites like the French Quarter in New Orleans, the Grand Canyon, and the Texas plains. Los Angeles was “provincial,” he told his parents: “intensely American, having little distinction and culture.” From California, he wrote to Stieglitz: “Everything is extremely American out here—You know what that means.” But the trip produced the work that gave him the confidence to return to 291 that summer—when Stieglitz invited him to make the gallery his home.
Strand joined the 291 group at the moment when Stieglitz’s relations with Meyer and de Zayas were unraveling. In 1916, Stieglitz turned to those who would replace them—painter and photographer Charles Sheeler, artists Morton Schamberg, Arthur Dove, William Zorach, and Abraham Walkowitz, who banded together with Steichen, Hartley, and Marin. Stieglitz began a set of portraits of his entourage posed in the gallery, starting with a photograph of Hartley looking out from under his large black hat. This series, which would come to include Marin, Walkowitz, Zorach, and Strand, a regular wrote, revealed “the skyscraper civilization as it lies in the struggling psyche of the male, men caught and held and torn in the fearful psychic conflicts of our day.”
In this company, Strand became a defender of the faith that artists could initiate social change by offering new ways to see the world. Despite his habitual reserve, he took part in passionate debates begun at 291 and continued on noontime tramps down Fifth Avenue to Stieglitz’s new round table at the Prince George Hotel. Passersby stared at them: “Steichen, lanky and boyish, Walkowitz, diminutive and dignified…Marin with his long lean face and roving dark eyes, Hartley, with the aloofness of Hamlet, the stocky mercurial Strand…and bringing up the rear, the nervous dynamo Stieglitz.” The group became Strand’s surrogate family.
Within a short time, the young man also endorsed Stieglitz’s idea of photography, as a means to embrace modern life. He may have sensed that Stieglitz was speaking personally when he dismissed pictorialism in favor of the more “masculine” works being produced under his aegis. The limits of pictorialism, Strand argued the following year in language echoing his mentor’s, resulted from some practitioners’ lack of respect for their craft. Most Americans refused to accept photography as a native form—o
ne developed “without the outside influence of Paris art-schools or their dilute offspring.” Yet just as their countrymen had built skyscrapers without foreign precedent, so Stieglitz had created “a living photographic tradition.” (Strand’s essay “Photography” was published in Seven Arts magazine, then in the final issue of Camera Work.)
Paul Strand, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York, 1915
Like Stieglitz, Strand wanted to capture the life of the city in motion. He took some photographs close to street level, as if immersed in its ebb and flow: Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York illustrates Strand’s wish to depict the formal patterns he saw in the streets in tension with their chaotic energy. More often, Strand photographed from the upper stories of tall buildings that offered secure roosts from which to survey the scene. City Hall Park, New York, shot from a courthouse window, caught people moving through the park below in a composition shaped by the dark curves repeated in the pathway, trees, and shadows—a bird’s-eye view that subsumes individuals into a swirling pattern.
Similarly, in Wall Street, photographed from a high vantage point across the street from the J. P. Morgan building, people rushing to work became part of a larger design, their shapes dwarfed by the dark rectangles of the site’s imposing facade. When he took this picture, Strand had been absorbed in “watching people walk by those huge…rather sinister windows,” he recalled: Rather than using his camera to critique capitalism, he was attempting to take a picture of movement that was “abstract and controlled.”
Yet Wall Street’s original title, Pedestrians Raked by Morning Light in a Canyon of Commerce, blends a concern for abstraction with the progressive aims of the 291 group. However mixed Strand’s motivation at the time, his photograph stands as a statement about industrialism’s power to overshadow human beings. As Stieglitz’s latest discovery, Strand was fulfilling his hopes: “In whatever he does,” his mentor wrote, “there is applied intelligence.” The two men could not have been more dissimilar—Stieglitz talked nonstop and dominated any gathering, while Strand’s guardedness caused him to hold back—yet they shared an unswerving commitment to their chosen medium.
* * *
. . .
Stieglitz again fell prey to depression in the winter of 1916, when anti-German sentiment dominated public opinion. It was some consolation to recognize in Strand someone like himself, though less outgoing and less fortunate in worldly terms. Their German-Jewish backgrounds strengthened the ties between them: The Strands had lived near the Stieglitzes before moving across town; Paul had studied art with Alfred’s friend Caffin. Seeing in the young man his hope of continuity, he decided that Strand’s would be the first exhibition of photographs at the gallery since his own in 1913. None had been hung there since then, he wrote, “because ‘291’ knew of no work outside of Paul Strand’s which was worthy.”
Coming less than ten years after his visit to 291 as a schoolboy, Strand’s one-man show, “Photographs of New York and Other Places,” fulfilled his dream. Stieglitz timed the opening to coincide with the run of the nearby Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters—the better to promote his protégé as a “modern.” On opening night, visitors wondered what to expect. Strand’s prints were striking, if not particularly innovative (Wall Street may not have been among them), but visitors were struck by the fact that his New York pictures were shown beside scenes from Europe—implying the photographer’s wish to treat native subjects with the same respect as foreign ones.
The exhibition featured Strand’s early work along with more graphic photographs like City Hall Park. His pictorialist print Maid of the Mist, Niagara Falls was much admired. A critic called it a “silvery picture of surpassing loveliness”; another said that it had won him “distinction among American pictorial photographers.” Caffin praised his former student’s skill as a “straight” photographer and called City Hall Park “a fragment of the kaleidoscopic variety of appearances and movements that make up our city life.” Stieglitz informed a friend that the show was a major event: Strand’s prints were “straight all the way through, in vision, in work and in feeling.”
Strand spent the summer of 1916 in Connecticut with his family, devoting himself to three months of “research”—his self-directed attempt to adapt Cubist techniques to his craft. Like Braque and Picasso, he selected household items—kitchen supplies and crockery—as his subjects. Turning a group of white porcelain bowls this way and that, he analyzed their depths and surfaces, then photographed them as related shapes. This series, including arrangements of bowls with pieces of fruit, became his equivalents of Cubist still lifes—something that had never before been tried in photography. He then took his experiments outside. The White Fence, a graphic photograph taken in Connecticut, simultaneously directs and blocks our gaze with its alignment of nine fence pickets standing like sentries in the foreground.
Looking back on that summer, Strand said that this group of semiabstractions marked a turning point: “I learned how you build a picture, what a picture consists of, how shapes are related to each other, how spaces are filled, how the whole must have a kind of unity.” He told Stieglitz, “It has been a summer of work, and I think I shall have some things to show you.” Stieglitz replied that he would feature some of Strand’s shots, including City Hall Park and Wall Street, in the next Camera Work: “It promises to be an unusually lively number.” In the introduction, he gave Strand high praise as a “new worker” in photography: “For ten years Strand quietly had been studying, constantly experimenting, keeping in close touch with all that is related to life in its fullest aspect.”
That autumn, Strand turned from geometric forms to portraits of people on the streets of New York. Unlike bowls and fence posts, such subjects were not easily controlled, nor could he let them know that he was taking pictures of them. He solved the problem by using a dummy lens and a viewfinder prism that seemed to focus his camera in another direction while he photographed at a right angle: That way, his subjects, unaware of the process, retained their natural expressions. But unlike Hine, he photographed them not so much to document their impoverishment as to capture them as striking subjects.
The best-known of this series, Blind Woman, captures a sightless newspaper vendor dressed in black. Many years later, Strand said that the woman, who had a white sign around her neck that said BLIND, was one of those “whom life had battered into some sort of extraordinary interest and, in a way, nobility.” At the time, he recalled, he took her portrait not so much in the spirit of social reform but because she was the focus of a composition that filled the frame with energy.
The clarity of Strand’s new prints encouraged Stieglitz to sharpen the focus of his own. That fall, he described his work (“just the straight goods”) to his friend R. Child Bayley, the editor of Amateur Photographer & Photography, in almost the same terms he had used for Strand. He was also taking pictures of his entourage. While Strand achieved his striking pictures by catching his subjects off guard, Stieglitz revealed his sitters’ natures by drawing on their trust. Given the older man’s self-assurance and the younger one’s caution, their differences were largely temperamental. More comfortable at a distance from those he portrayed, Strand struggled to allow emotion into form; Stieglitz took portraits of friends to express their shared purpose.
By 1917, it was clear to the 291 group that Strand saw Stieglitz as his mentor and Stieglitz looked to Strand as his heir apparent. Less assertive than Steichen and more purely American than Haviland, Strand was the disciple Stieglitz had dreamed of finding; what was more, his technical skills matched—some said surpassed—Stieglitz’s own. In time, Strand would see the older man as the figure against whom he would have to define himself, while Stieglitz would insist on taking credit for Strand as “the first photographer of great promise to have received his visual education at the Photo-Secession Galleries.” Eventually, the two would become rivals in their work and in their personal lives
. But that spring, as Stieglitz prepared to run more of Strand’s prints in the last issue of Camera Work, he was forthright in his praise: “The eleven photographs in this number represent the real Paul Strand. The man who has actually done something from within. The photographer who has added something to what has gone before. The work is brutally direct. Devoid of all flim-flam; devoid of trickery and of any ‘ism.’ ”
It is challenging, given their different temperaments, to grasp the significance of Strand’s presence in Stieglitz’s life just then, yet it is clear that in his view the young man’s boldness of vision seemed to indicate a new direction in photography—with images that were “brutally direct” rather than soft, hazy, or pictorial. At this point, when Stieglitz tended to see his own work as proceeding from his generative powers, Strand’s potent new images would revitalize their art. They were, Stieglitz declared, “the direct expression of today.”
CHAPTER 4
A Woman on Paper
1915–1916
Georgia O’Keeffe went to 291 for a last look in June 1915, after a term at Columbia University’s Teachers College. That year, she and her classmates often inspected the exhibits—Marin (she was charmed by his Woolworth Building series), Picasso, and Braque (neither said much to her). What she loved about the place, she told her friend Anita Pollitzer, was the atmosphere.
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