Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Haran, Barnaby

Titel

Documenting an ‘Age‐Long Struggle’: Paul Strand's Time in the American Southwest

Ist Teil von

• Art history, 2020-02, Vol.43 (1), p.120-153

Ort / Verlag

Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Wiley Blackwell Single Titles

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Paul Strand spent the summers of 1930, 1931, and 1932 extensively photographing the American Southwest from his temporary base in Taos, New Mexico. When Paul Strand was preparing to travel to Mexico in 1932, he asked his friend Harold Clurman, the director of the Group Theatre, to write on his behalf to the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for funding for a photographic series on the country's people and places. In this article, I argue that Clurman's curt and acute, yet hitherto unattributed, statement provides a compelling early portrayal of Strand's mature idiom as a sustained examination of objects, people and environments, and their interconnectedness. For Clurman, Strand's photography constituted a multi‐faceted record of a place as an index of an ‘age‐long struggle’. I assert that Clurman was not simply a counsel during Strand's politicization but also a mentor for the photographer's crystallizing conception of his work, a process that started with his profile of Strand in Creative Art in 1929.