Paul Strand Southwest
Paul Strand (Photographer), Rebecca Busselle, Trudy Wilner Stack, Trudy Wilner. StackBooks.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
For Paul Strand, the great pioneer of modernism, the summers of 1926 and 1930-1932 were a return to experimentation and periods of great artistic growth. He worked in makeshift darkrooms-one in a hotel basement and another above the Taos movie theater. The Southwest period brought not only artistic renewal, but also personal turmoil. His political and social ideas were shifting, and his relationship with the two most important people in his life-his wife Rebecca and his mentor Alfred Stieglitz-were disintegrating. This book reconstructs, in an intimate, visual way, the emotional and creative swirl around Paul Strand, through beautiful reproductions of his images from the period and a comprehensive collection of notes, illustrations, and ephemera.While a handful of Strand's Southwest photographs have been previously published, this period of his outstanding career remains largely unexplored. Paul Strand Southwest presents many images for the first time, including dramatic landscapes, decayed ghost towns, the noble architecture of adobe churches, and his final, austere portraits of Rebecca.
Synopsis
At first Strand's photography was all tension and geometry in the streets of New York. Suddenly, in his trips to Taos, it was all tension and geometry in sagebrush backlit under a confection of clouds, a single dark figure approaching a white cascade of adobe from its shadows, and Georgia O'Keefe's angular and naked body. Fifty of Strand's 1930-32 monochrome photographs of the Southwest are at the core of this collection, along with artifacts from his time there while he struggled with the end of a marriage and a mentorship. The experience attenuated Strand's mastery of a medium for which he had been born. The commentary includes quotes from a diverse group of artists and writers; the text is spare, fluid, and refuses to overshadow either the photography or the photographer. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR