What do you think?
Rate this book
Toward a Deeper Understanding: Paul Strand at Work
In the late 1940s, Paul Strand spoke of creating "a series of photographs that focused on the history, architecture, environs and people of a small town (which) would reveal 'the common denominator of all humanity' and would be a bridge toward a deeper understanding between countries." This book presents a rigorously edited selection of these photographs, made in France, Italy and New England between the years 1943 and 1953. Whether depicting an old French fisherman, a stormy sea or a tilting New England gravestone, Strand identified and explored certain central themes that included the primal connection between humans and the natural world; the beauty of simple objects and structures; and the inherent dignity of every individual regardless of wealth or social status. The exquisitely reproduced photographs gathered here encourage the viewer to look closely, and observe how details and formal relations emerge.
72 pages, Hardcover
First published July 1, 2007
1 person want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 11, 2022
This is a beautiful little book, but with the emphasis on little—my review of it probably takes longer to read than the book does. It's about 7x8 inches, but the nicely reproduced photos within are mostly around 4x3 or a little smaller, though there are some 4x5s. But it's the kind of book that screams quality the moment you pick it up, and the photo applied to the cloth cover is striking in its fine quality of reproduction, to a degree I'm not used to seeing on a cover. Whoever designed this book cared a lot about the first impression, and did a wonderful job designing it.
I initially gave it five stars because I feel like the book does a well presented job of whatever it set out to do, even if I'm not super clear on what it aimed to do, and I wondered if the selection of photos couldn't have been stronger. But from the outset I realized I was perhaps being generous, and after further consideration of what Strand's goal was and how this book accomplished its goal of presenting that, I feel I really have no choice but to downgrade it at least a star. But it hurts me to do it, because I enjoy picking up this book and admiring what a fine volume it *appears* to be. I'd sum it up as a remarkably well made book that's probably not worth buying except for how good it looks sitting on a coffee table.
I think the problem here is revealed right in the description: "In the late 1940s, Paul Strand spoke of creating 'a series of photographs that focused on the history, architecture, environs and people of a small town [which] would... be a bridge toward a deeper understanding between countries.' This book presents a rigorously edited selection of these photographs..."
The problem comes from the "rigorously edited" part. These photos were created at, and pulled from, various times in various places, but they were shot with the intention of being a piece in a series about one particular place. This pulling-from-series approach might work with a genre like street photography where every image is likely an interesting moment captured in an interesting way, so that it works as piece of a whole, or alone, or as a piece in a collection created around some separate idea. However, when the photos tend to be such quiet contemplations of the ordinary-everyday of a particular place, with the intent of creating a series to convey an understanding of that one place, and eventually of the relation between that whole to another whole, it's a lot harder to make this work, and it especially doesn't work if you're not able to find enough standout/standalone photos to hold it together.
So, instead of a deeper understanding of what it's like in a town in France in the early 50s, we get nicely composed but quiet images, lacking in the sense of subject needed to stand on their own, dispensed almost at random from France, Italy, and Vermont/Maine/New England from about 1944 to 1953. The way this book present's Strand's attempt at finding "a deeper understanding" seems to almost intentionally undermine that idea, presenting the incomplete pieces of various works out of context so that it becomes difficult to understand what he was even trying to do.
Even the way the way the book is divided seems to exacerbate that issue to me. By dividing the photos by subject, into Portraits, Architecture, and Landscapes, it appears an attempt was made to help Strand's thesis along by presenting related subjects of separate places together to help showcase "the common denominator of all humanity" that was sought. However, by comparing the component pieces instead of the series they were pulled from as a whole, I think we're left with the impression simply that these places are rather different, and some offer up interesting scenes more easily than others. If anything I'm left with these series-contradicting conclusions: People in geographically close Italy and France are far more similar than the Americans across an ocean are to them, even though the three areas selected are racially homogeneous; generic landscapes of fields can be found anywhere that has fields (surprising no one), and these three selected locations happen to be such places; and interesting compositions of isolated details that could be anywhere in the world can in fact be found anywhere in the world. In the end, rather than contributing to Strand's idea that series from these places would demonstrate our worldwide commonality, this book at best seems to show that a single photographer can take similar photos anywhere, but will encounter people who are more different from each other the farther apart they are located. At worst, it feels a little damning that the view we see of the project here suggests Strand attempted to show similarity of people in rural white areas with comparable climates, and still the impression is more of the difference between distant lands compared to neighboring ones.
As an aside of sorts, Strand's description of his lofty understanding-promoting goals is taken from his Fulbright Fellowship application. I take him at his word when he says that was his focus, but at the same time... I know that when Brett Weston applied for his Guggenheim around this same period, he used similarly ambitious wording about doing work that would advance cultural understanding of a specified area, and it was just nonsense that he knew would appeal to those awarding the grants. So even if if I buy Strand's utter sincerity, it's not lost on me that he was blowing the smoke that grant committees of the time were known to throw money at, which adds to my disappointment that this book looks at the attempt without giving an impression that he successfully followed through on it. It could also be said that Strand's earnest attempt at a larger goal is the excuse for why many of these photos feel insubstantial and meaningless when presented out of their context; if the goal hadn't been sincere, and he'd only intended to talk himself into a grant to fund personal work in distant areas, as Brett did, then we'd expect him to return with individually strong images, as Brett did. It would be that much more difficult to have understanding for the weakness of what he appears to have returned with, relative to his previous work.
Anyway, most of the rest of my review comes from my immediate reactions after just picking it up and reading it, reacting to it without much outside context. I'll leave it in because I think some of the descriptions and impressions might still be helpful, but my initial thoughts are less relevant now that I've reconsidered it based on the stated goals of both Strand and this book.
It starts with a seven page essay giving some thoughts on Strand, with a focus on how he liked to capture a given part of the world. It's a quick and easy read.
I'm left wishing this book had more explicitly explained what it is. It's about "Paul Strand at Work," in that it's about how he worked in areas he visited. It heads "Toward a Deeper Understanding," in that Strand seemed to study these places and their inhabitants in a way that could be characterized as almost academic in its dryness. You could say he was simply cataloging interesting people, buildings, and scenes if the photos didn't all demonstrate such precise, clear-eyed, and carefully considered composition. Is the book looking for a deeper understanding of him and how he worked as well? Maybe, but I don't feel like I gained an understanding of why he did what he did if this selection is the strongest representation of what he did in these environments and situations.
No doubt this book shows Strand as a photographer of monumental capability, technically and compositionally, but the flipside of how precise and consistent the compositions are is that it's easy to flip through and start to feel like the collection is formal to the point of feeling stiff and lifeless. And I say that as someone who loves highly formal and meticulously composed photos: I appreciate how he shot these, but not many of them catch my interest as something more than excellent illustrations for a composition textbook, or a dry article about life in a particular rural area. This is in stark contrast to his photos of the American Southwest, which have such a power and life to them that you stare at a carefully composed image of a wall and wonder where such energy came from in that scene.
This book focuses primarily on France and Italy, with a few from New England, or at least that's the impression; in truth I think the three regions are more or less equally represented, and it seems more Euro-centric because the 2/3rds Italy/France content blurs together and overwhelms the 1/3rd American. Why did the Strand in these places tend to convey boredom and a sense of (what I perceive as a photographer) trying to shoot his way out of a rut, when the previous Strand in New Mexico was spitting fire into the emulsion? This book has some very impressively well seen photos, and some that are nice shots of nothing subjects, but there's nothing that struck me as having the magic he was capable of, and the most interesting thing I'm left with is the question of what made this work so different, and if this is representative of all of his work from a particular period.
Four thoughts that felt notable came to me as I went through this collection of photos:
1) There's a type of photo that I call etudes, and I've seen others use the term as well. It means the same here as in music: a piece focused on practicing challenging technical elements, like forming ordered compositions of complicated scenes. Their purpose is practice, and the result, while sometimes interesting, is usually rather dry and lacking in an emotional hook. Every photo in here gives the sense that every detail in it was observed and taken into account, and the scene was composed as well as it could have been, whether it was worth the effort or not. There are a handful of what feel like strong finished photos here, and many of the rest struck me as etudes or experiments that he might not have meant for publication.
2) Some of these photos feel a little like if a "snapshot aesthetic" were combined with an ultra-formal large format fine art approach. The result of such a combination would be, I think, quite a lot like some of what's found here: the worst of both worlds, with the indiscriminate subject matter of the former but without the lively elements of in-the-moment chaos and chance; the finely crafted and heavily analyzed composition of the latter but without the discrimination in releasing the shutter.
3) Among modernist-era artists there was a lot of talk about sentiment, and how strong work was seen as without sentiment, while weak work relied on sentiment toward the subject or message to carry the work. Several of the photos in here caught my attention for seeming like sentiment was supposed to fill in their blanks—I don't think anyone's going to be interested in this bored bride unless they know her story, this particular headstone against a dull sky unless they have some connection, this field of grass with ugly rectangles cut into it or this random tree lined marshy grassland with tracks through it if they're not from there, this plain field with a few trees unless they know the woman standing in the distance.
But, while some of the landscapes feel like they're supposed to be carried by an expected sentiment that isn't there, the portraits are unsentimental to the point of feeling detached, a little icy, and maybe even self-conscious in their apparent attempt to demonstrate a clinical distance and lack of sentiment. I mentioned before that elements here might work with street photo but not here, and in this I'm again reminded of street: the portraits feel reminiscent of the disconnected strangers that pass through street photos, except they're not passing through, they're sitting posed before a carefully arranged large format camera. There's something in that I find uncomfortable, and not as if it's fresh and novel, just that it's unenjoyable and inadequate to the purpose of finding connection between these people.
After a few such photos, they almost start to feel like intentional satire to me: Strand seeing if he can shoot tourist snaps but with his usual attention to detail, to highlight how the scene lacks.
4) If Edward Weston were dropped into these same places, in a majority of cases I think he'd have come up with a more interesting photo. Even though I'm decidedly Team Edward, I don't always think that's the case: when I look at Strand's strongest work, I'm blown away by what he was capable of—I think Strand at his best was legitimately one of the best to ever live. But in the case of many of the selections here, I found myself thinking, "Edward would have found something more interesting in there or wouldn't have bothered taking the shot."
Similarly, I can't escape a Brett Weston comparison to these photos. I feel like the strongest photos in this book are very much comparable to what Brett did in similar European village locations, with architectural elements arranged as abstractions, and with other similar subject matter. Strand's 1950 cover image of houses in Locmariaquer feels like a precursor to Brett's more heavily abstracted 1971 shot of houses in a Spanish town. But my point here is that Strand's strongest here stand up well and, even though I'm a great fan of Brett's work, I feel like the best seen photos here are arranged with a sense of perfection that a more aggressively abstracted Brett take might not have had. However, as soon as one of these images calls to mind how well it compares to what Brett might have done there, it's followed by the realization that Brett would have never released the shutter on the majority of what's here. So, strikingly variable quality lets down the overall impression of what's collected here.
Criticism of the included works aside, it's actually an enjoyable enough book, considering the low time commitment it demands, though I enjoyed casually picking it up and flipping through a few pages at a time more than sitting down and studying each photo. I'd say the architecture section is by far the strongest; the stern portraits are interesting in their old-timey otherworldliness; and the landscapes include a few enjoyable ones from both the organized-chaos and the composed-calm ends of the spectrum, but this section's quality is the most variable.
Again though, Strand was incredible, and this book shows his great skill even if the results presented include some of his dullest work, and the book is an object of beauty in itself.
I initially gave it five stars because I feel like the book does a well presented job of whatever it set out to do, even if I'm not super clear on what it aimed to do, and I wondered if the selection of photos couldn't have been stronger. But from the outset I realized I was perhaps being generous, and after further consideration of what Strand's goal was and how this book accomplished its goal of presenting that, I feel I really have no choice but to downgrade it at least a star. But it hurts me to do it, because I enjoy picking up this book and admiring what a fine volume it *appears* to be. I'd sum it up as a remarkably well made book that's probably not worth buying except for how good it looks sitting on a coffee table.
I think the problem here is revealed right in the description: "In the late 1940s, Paul Strand spoke of creating 'a series of photographs that focused on the history, architecture, environs and people of a small town [which] would... be a bridge toward a deeper understanding between countries.' This book presents a rigorously edited selection of these photographs..."
The problem comes from the "rigorously edited" part. These photos were created at, and pulled from, various times in various places, but they were shot with the intention of being a piece in a series about one particular place. This pulling-from-series approach might work with a genre like street photography where every image is likely an interesting moment captured in an interesting way, so that it works as piece of a whole, or alone, or as a piece in a collection created around some separate idea. However, when the photos tend to be such quiet contemplations of the ordinary-everyday of a particular place, with the intent of creating a series to convey an understanding of that one place, and eventually of the relation between that whole to another whole, it's a lot harder to make this work, and it especially doesn't work if you're not able to find enough standout/standalone photos to hold it together.
So, instead of a deeper understanding of what it's like in a town in France in the early 50s, we get nicely composed but quiet images, lacking in the sense of subject needed to stand on their own, dispensed almost at random from France, Italy, and Vermont/Maine/New England from about 1944 to 1953. The way this book present's Strand's attempt at finding "a deeper understanding" seems to almost intentionally undermine that idea, presenting the incomplete pieces of various works out of context so that it becomes difficult to understand what he was even trying to do.
Even the way the way the book is divided seems to exacerbate that issue to me. By dividing the photos by subject, into Portraits, Architecture, and Landscapes, it appears an attempt was made to help Strand's thesis along by presenting related subjects of separate places together to help showcase "the common denominator of all humanity" that was sought. However, by comparing the component pieces instead of the series they were pulled from as a whole, I think we're left with the impression simply that these places are rather different, and some offer up interesting scenes more easily than others. If anything I'm left with these series-contradicting conclusions: People in geographically close Italy and France are far more similar than the Americans across an ocean are to them, even though the three areas selected are racially homogeneous; generic landscapes of fields can be found anywhere that has fields (surprising no one), and these three selected locations happen to be such places; and interesting compositions of isolated details that could be anywhere in the world can in fact be found anywhere in the world. In the end, rather than contributing to Strand's idea that series from these places would demonstrate our worldwide commonality, this book at best seems to show that a single photographer can take similar photos anywhere, but will encounter people who are more different from each other the farther apart they are located. At worst, it feels a little damning that the view we see of the project here suggests Strand attempted to show similarity of people in rural white areas with comparable climates, and still the impression is more of the difference between distant lands compared to neighboring ones.
As an aside of sorts, Strand's description of his lofty understanding-promoting goals is taken from his Fulbright Fellowship application. I take him at his word when he says that was his focus, but at the same time... I know that when Brett Weston applied for his Guggenheim around this same period, he used similarly ambitious wording about doing work that would advance cultural understanding of a specified area, and it was just nonsense that he knew would appeal to those awarding the grants. So even if if I buy Strand's utter sincerity, it's not lost on me that he was blowing the smoke that grant committees of the time were known to throw money at, which adds to my disappointment that this book looks at the attempt without giving an impression that he successfully followed through on it. It could also be said that Strand's earnest attempt at a larger goal is the excuse for why many of these photos feel insubstantial and meaningless when presented out of their context; if the goal hadn't been sincere, and he'd only intended to talk himself into a grant to fund personal work in distant areas, as Brett did, then we'd expect him to return with individually strong images, as Brett did. It would be that much more difficult to have understanding for the weakness of what he appears to have returned with, relative to his previous work.
Anyway, most of the rest of my review comes from my immediate reactions after just picking it up and reading it, reacting to it without much outside context. I'll leave it in because I think some of the descriptions and impressions might still be helpful, but my initial thoughts are less relevant now that I've reconsidered it based on the stated goals of both Strand and this book.
It starts with a seven page essay giving some thoughts on Strand, with a focus on how he liked to capture a given part of the world. It's a quick and easy read.
I'm left wishing this book had more explicitly explained what it is. It's about "Paul Strand at Work," in that it's about how he worked in areas he visited. It heads "Toward a Deeper Understanding," in that Strand seemed to study these places and their inhabitants in a way that could be characterized as almost academic in its dryness. You could say he was simply cataloging interesting people, buildings, and scenes if the photos didn't all demonstrate such precise, clear-eyed, and carefully considered composition. Is the book looking for a deeper understanding of him and how he worked as well? Maybe, but I don't feel like I gained an understanding of why he did what he did if this selection is the strongest representation of what he did in these environments and situations.
No doubt this book shows Strand as a photographer of monumental capability, technically and compositionally, but the flipside of how precise and consistent the compositions are is that it's easy to flip through and start to feel like the collection is formal to the point of feeling stiff and lifeless. And I say that as someone who loves highly formal and meticulously composed photos: I appreciate how he shot these, but not many of them catch my interest as something more than excellent illustrations for a composition textbook, or a dry article about life in a particular rural area. This is in stark contrast to his photos of the American Southwest, which have such a power and life to them that you stare at a carefully composed image of a wall and wonder where such energy came from in that scene.
This book focuses primarily on France and Italy, with a few from New England, or at least that's the impression; in truth I think the three regions are more or less equally represented, and it seems more Euro-centric because the 2/3rds Italy/France content blurs together and overwhelms the 1/3rd American. Why did the Strand in these places tend to convey boredom and a sense of (what I perceive as a photographer) trying to shoot his way out of a rut, when the previous Strand in New Mexico was spitting fire into the emulsion? This book has some very impressively well seen photos, and some that are nice shots of nothing subjects, but there's nothing that struck me as having the magic he was capable of, and the most interesting thing I'm left with is the question of what made this work so different, and if this is representative of all of his work from a particular period.
Four thoughts that felt notable came to me as I went through this collection of photos:
1) There's a type of photo that I call etudes, and I've seen others use the term as well. It means the same here as in music: a piece focused on practicing challenging technical elements, like forming ordered compositions of complicated scenes. Their purpose is practice, and the result, while sometimes interesting, is usually rather dry and lacking in an emotional hook. Every photo in here gives the sense that every detail in it was observed and taken into account, and the scene was composed as well as it could have been, whether it was worth the effort or not. There are a handful of what feel like strong finished photos here, and many of the rest struck me as etudes or experiments that he might not have meant for publication.
2) Some of these photos feel a little like if a "snapshot aesthetic" were combined with an ultra-formal large format fine art approach. The result of such a combination would be, I think, quite a lot like some of what's found here: the worst of both worlds, with the indiscriminate subject matter of the former but without the lively elements of in-the-moment chaos and chance; the finely crafted and heavily analyzed composition of the latter but without the discrimination in releasing the shutter.
3) Among modernist-era artists there was a lot of talk about sentiment, and how strong work was seen as without sentiment, while weak work relied on sentiment toward the subject or message to carry the work. Several of the photos in here caught my attention for seeming like sentiment was supposed to fill in their blanks—I don't think anyone's going to be interested in this bored bride unless they know her story, this particular headstone against a dull sky unless they have some connection, this field of grass with ugly rectangles cut into it or this random tree lined marshy grassland with tracks through it if they're not from there, this plain field with a few trees unless they know the woman standing in the distance.
But, while some of the landscapes feel like they're supposed to be carried by an expected sentiment that isn't there, the portraits are unsentimental to the point of feeling detached, a little icy, and maybe even self-conscious in their apparent attempt to demonstrate a clinical distance and lack of sentiment. I mentioned before that elements here might work with street photo but not here, and in this I'm again reminded of street: the portraits feel reminiscent of the disconnected strangers that pass through street photos, except they're not passing through, they're sitting posed before a carefully arranged large format camera. There's something in that I find uncomfortable, and not as if it's fresh and novel, just that it's unenjoyable and inadequate to the purpose of finding connection between these people.
After a few such photos, they almost start to feel like intentional satire to me: Strand seeing if he can shoot tourist snaps but with his usual attention to detail, to highlight how the scene lacks.
4) If Edward Weston were dropped into these same places, in a majority of cases I think he'd have come up with a more interesting photo. Even though I'm decidedly Team Edward, I don't always think that's the case: when I look at Strand's strongest work, I'm blown away by what he was capable of—I think Strand at his best was legitimately one of the best to ever live. But in the case of many of the selections here, I found myself thinking, "Edward would have found something more interesting in there or wouldn't have bothered taking the shot."
Similarly, I can't escape a Brett Weston comparison to these photos. I feel like the strongest photos in this book are very much comparable to what Brett did in similar European village locations, with architectural elements arranged as abstractions, and with other similar subject matter. Strand's 1950 cover image of houses in Locmariaquer feels like a precursor to Brett's more heavily abstracted 1971 shot of houses in a Spanish town. But my point here is that Strand's strongest here stand up well and, even though I'm a great fan of Brett's work, I feel like the best seen photos here are arranged with a sense of perfection that a more aggressively abstracted Brett take might not have had. However, as soon as one of these images calls to mind how well it compares to what Brett might have done there, it's followed by the realization that Brett would have never released the shutter on the majority of what's here. So, strikingly variable quality lets down the overall impression of what's collected here.
Criticism of the included works aside, it's actually an enjoyable enough book, considering the low time commitment it demands, though I enjoyed casually picking it up and flipping through a few pages at a time more than sitting down and studying each photo. I'd say the architecture section is by far the strongest; the stern portraits are interesting in their old-timey otherworldliness; and the landscapes include a few enjoyable ones from both the organized-chaos and the composed-calm ends of the spectrum, but this section's quality is the most variable.
Again though, Strand was incredible, and this book shows his great skill even if the results presented include some of his dullest work, and the book is an object of beauty in itself.
Displaying 1 of 1 review