‘Documenting an “Age-Long Struggle”: Paul Strand’s Time in the American Southwest’

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Haran, B. (2020). Documenting an ‘Age‐Long Struggle’: Paul Strand's Time in the American Southwest. Art History, 43(1), pp.120-153. which has been published in final form at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8365.12472. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions. ‘Documenting an “Age-Long Struggle”: Paul Strand’s Time in the American Southwest’ Barnaby Haran

In it time is no more a bright suspicion of the brain at which the mind leaps only to fall back frustrate and mowing at itself from a clock's face, but a tranquillizing certainty'. xv  Primordial inhibition may stand in the way. On the geologic time scale, a human lifetime is reduced to brevity that is too inhibiting to think about. The mind blocks the information'. xviii Strand's pictures of the Southwest conflated people, buildings, objects, and landscapes as equivalent traces of deep time processes, the 'age-long struggle' over centuries manifesting in the present.
Strand clearly considered Clurman's reference to be an apposite assessment, because the note appeared in published form, sans the first and last sentences and translated into Spanish, in the catalogue to an exhibition of his photographs at the Sala de Arte in Mexico City in February 1933. xix Organized by the Mexican composer that Stieglitz's 'going about the world (paradoxically in the narrow confines of An American Place) as the evangel of a great spiritual awakening and regeneration' clashed with her view that 'a fundamental reconstruction of society' must occur 'before the artist can have a fair deal'. xxiii In 1933 Strand himself wrote pointedly to Ansel Adams that 'these are critical years for anyone who is alive-aware-had not insulated himself in some "esthetic" rut-away from the world-The world itself in a profound process of change-social change, as it appears to me'. xxiv For Stieglitz, Strand's departure from An American Place was a rejection of 'The Idea': 'I don't forget the many years of Paul's loyalty not only to me personally but to something beyond all of us-to The Idea-and The Idea is as alive as ever.
That I know'. xxv 'The Idea' was a constellation of principles around art, love, and life that amounted to a generic attitude rather than a clearly defined set of tenets, an amorphous array of ideals and strictures with a fin-de-siècle secessionist spirit that constituted a liberatory, quasi-spiritual sensibility. Strand's intellectual formation back to the radical culture of the 1910s, and notes the influence of the Seven Arts milieu, in particular Waldo Frank, on his 'Romantic anticapitalist' world-view. xxxii In 1933, Strand described Communism as 'a philosophy of action, to be tested by action and one which accepts the machine as a part of human life, never to be rejected, but to be controlled'. xxxiii In doing so, he adapted the theme of his 1922 Broom article 'Photography and the New God', in which he claimed that Stieglitz's photographs humanized Machine Age modernity, constituting 'a highly evolved crystallization of the photographic principle, the unqualified subjugation of a machine to the single purpose of expression'. xxxiv Applying Strand's own term, I contend that Strand and Clurman's dialogue marked a 'crystallization' of the former's conception, based upon the recognition of the affinity of his idiom with the Group Theatre's methods. Strand's 'transition years' did not witness a Damascene shift in his work but a realization of its significance, along the lines of John Dewey's explanation of Semiotic signification: 'every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some meaning seems almost within reach, but is elusive; it refuses to condense into definite form; the attaching of a word somehow…puts limits around the meaning, draws it out from the void, makes it stand out as an entity on its own account'. xxxv There was much continuity in Strand's thinking about photography as he radicalized during the 1930s and developed his mature idiom, except regarding one key factor-for a few years, he stopped taking crawling over each other. Perhaps I insult the arts, you, your spirit, is an entity, the paradox that make NY, living, and it is never distant, for as one travels away from NY its deadness and cheapness, standardized mediocrity, in towns and towns trying to be cities'. xxxviii In contrast the Southwest was pure, primitive, and Edenic: 'here the mountains are untouched, fine and wonderful, great […] The variety here is infinite, snow mountains, great towering rock hills, pine covered moraines, and in between meadows of exquisite greens pine dotted'. xxxix The mythology of the Southwest depended upon this antithesis to American urban modernity-as McCausland put it, 'a mesa is more miraculous than a metropolis'. xl The sublime landscape of mountains, canyons and mesa, the expanse of sky and the brilliant light, the turbulent weather, the rich ethnic variety of pueblo-dwelling Native-Americans, Mexicans, and white settlers, drew numerous cultural tourists to the region. The appeal was the atavistic otherness of a region that the writer and explorer Charles Lummis had portrayed as the 'wonderland of the Southwest' (he also claimed to have coined 'Southwest'), a land of 'poco tiempo' (pretty soon), of 'sun, silence, and adobe'. xli Lummis wrote that 'New Mexico is the anomaly of the Republic', being 'a century older in European civilization than the rest, and several centuries older still in a happier civilization of its own'. xlii The wild and remote landscape stood out even amidst America's great wildernesses because of the added element of brilliant sunlight: ' "Picturesque" is a tame word for it. It is a picture, a romance, a dream, all in one. It is our one corner that is the sun's very own '. xliii The appeal of the region for artists was considerable. Since the 1890s, when Joseph Henry Sharp first depicted the Indians of Taos, an artistic community developed, most notably taking shape in the Taos Society of Artists, which ran from Brown that 'there were some things I didn't do out there but I never got to do. Which were some photographs inside the churches portraits of the people who lived there, who were indigenous; not the artists colony but some of the people indigenous to New Mexico. But I never got to do it. xlviii In the end, Strand concentrated more on the place more than the populace: 'the only thing that is intensely living for me here is the country itself', he told Stieglitz. xlix Though far from a sociological or anthropological analysis of the place, Strand's engagement with the Southwest was historically oriented, in the sense of viewing the region's present forms as receptacles of long temporal processes. The most well-known subject in these images is the San Francisco de Asis Mission Church of Ranchos de Taos, which he photographed several times during each visit, as did Ansel Adams, in 1929, and many artists, including O'Keeffe and Salsbury. In concert with these evocative surfaces and details, the relationship of the building to the town and the landscape, of figure to ground, is crucial to the photograph's potent invocation of time. The strata of the image-the sky, the mountains, the hotel, and the street-connote several discrete yet harmonious temporalities. The passing clouds, pierced by sunlight, indicate the ephemeral against the mountains' ancient geologic span, albeit smattered with trees and scrub of a shorter cycle, framing the pastness of the American House and the presentness of the photographic perspective from the street via the (extended, as I shall discuss) now of the exposure. The deep time of the mountains provides the bass note, sounded by the rocks whose sublime ancientness exposes the provisionality of the human structure, whilst conveying the courage of such endeavours in its ragged endurance, so that the imagined former life of American House is concentrated into a myth of 'man's age-long struggle to live in harmony with it even amidst its fiercest rigors', thus constituting a 'record of heroism' residing in this failed, yet fearless, settlement.
Although the town is usually unidentified, I can confirm that this picture shows the American House Hotel in St Elmo in Chaffee County, Colorado, a mining community in the Chalk Creek region. lv (Fig. 9) St Elmo was one of numerous such communities that developed in the mid 19 th century, its inhabitants lured to this inhospitable outer reach by the prospects of gold or silver. At its peak in the 1890s the Eugène Atget as 'a man much more naive than Hill, yet whose work is just as pure, just as direct, whose pictures of the shops, buildings, and markets of Paris are informed with the same nobility of spirit'. lxxi This observation chimes with Revueltas's statement in the Sala de Arte catalogue: [Strand's]  Section, he found that their works suffered due to poor printing: Perhaps because of the urgency of those years the organization of this vast work did not permit the photographers to print their own negatives, to make at least a master set of prints. I think this was a weakness. A photographer who never makes a print or an etcher who never pulls a proof is only half an artist, whose creative gift will react adversely to such restriction. cxii However, Photo League member Aaron Siskind derided Strand as 'basically a Pictorialist' although 'he felt that he was a documentary photographer-or he pretended he was, or said he was. And I felt that his aesthetic was distorted'. cxiii Yet Strand was fully aware that his photographs did not adhere to the agendas and tendencies of the League's documentary work. In 'Photography and Other Arts', Strand praised the 'vital documentary movement in photography' of the 1930s that 'far outstripped the other arts in scope and effective communication, in this period'. cxiv He commended this 'so-called documentary in photography that came out of the crisis', which 'was, in reality, the turning of many cameras towards the lives of people', but did not situate himself within this company. cxv Rather, he positioned himself tellingly between Stieglitz and Evans and Abbott. The latter two photographers also undertook a photographic 'exploration' of places, and their works, especially images of New York, drew from Atget's urban documents. cxvi Atget's famous deadpan summation of his work as 'simply documents that I make' is clearly divergent from the expressivity of the Stieglitz circle. cxvii Nevertheless, Strand had long argued for a type of document-oriented photography, in which Stieglitz's legacy remained preeminent.
In 1921 Strand wrote in tribute called 'Alfred Stieglitz and a Machine', which accompanied an exhibition at the Anderson Galleries that brought the 'Georgia O'Keeffe Portrait' to the public, that: 'He has given portraiture in any medium, the new significance of a deliberate attempt to register those forces of today whose sum constitutes an individual, whose sum therefore documents In Stieglitz there is no revolt, no social attitude: always spontaneous acceptance, unquestioning, for what is there. In you (your photographs) the object is seen as having a distinct but separate life of its own-and a very powerful immovable life, untouched and untouchable by man. This may lead to a view of the object as a kind of gloomy fate-and create a kind of hopelessness, which you never never whine about, but which leads to a kind of "morose heroism" (as I put it in the note in Creative Art). cxxiii Clurman conjoined this 'morose heroism' with Strand's need for collective engagement, and remarked that Strand's Group engagement involved understanding that 'Art as a means in the struggle, as an integral part of the struggle'-albeit absenting particular struggles, such as the forces that formed ghost towns or the ongoing crises in Southwestern mining communities. cxxiv The trading of the everyday for an emphatic presentness as a condensation of history, the deep time richly manifested in the materiality of the print, might help render the pictures timeless, or less 'dated' than, say, photojournalism. They are nonetheless curious historical documents, offering scant information about the places, but resonate their essences through close scrutiny of details of diverse yet equivalent objects forged over time, as constellated elements within a group. In the Southwest, and other environs thereafter, Strand sacrificed momentary trenchancy, and with it instrumentality, to expose time's effects in the constituent parts of a place, as analogues of an 'age-long struggle'. Essays on His Life and Work, Millerton, N.Y., 1991, 87-99. iiii Harold Clurman, Untitled Manuscript, Paul Strand Papers, Box 7 AG 17 11/6. The text is unattributed with a verso note stating 'writer not remembered', though the text was certainly by Clurman, as it appears in the 1933 Sala de Arte catalogue. See note 5.