A dark, inconsolable face peers out from the cover of the catalog accompanying the Art Institute’s exhibit of photographs by Paul Strand. The artist’s name appears above the handsome face. A man of reserve, he was so rarely photographed that you might take it as a self-portrait. Actually it’s Rebecca, Strand’s first wife, the woman he photographed more intimately and more often than anyone else in his life. Her long hair pulled back, she stares into her husband’s camera from an unfathomable distance, estranged by a palpable sadness, a liquid glint in her eyes. The photograph (a 1922 platinum print) is exquisite. Their marriage was not.
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If personal commitments were difficult for Strand, political commitments were not. They found expression in a lesser-known part of his career: his collective documentary filmmaking. For many years he hired out as a commercial cinematographer, but hanging out with members of the Group Theater in New York City, he saw that theater could be run democratically and that it could convey liberal themes. In 1935 he visited Moscow, where he met director Sergey Eisenstein, and two years later founded Frontier Films to address social issues. Nevertheless, his membership in a film crew pursuing a progressive agenda contrasted sharply with his solo printing of still lifes in the darkroom.
Some of the films he worked on are being screened at the Film Center in conjunction with the Art Institute exhibit. His first film is a lyrical short made with painter Charles Sheeler in 1920. Originally titled “New York the Magnificent,” this silent black-and-white visual poem was renamed Manhatta after the Walt Whitman poem it quotes. Strand’s press release announced: “the photographers have tried to register directly the living forms in front of them”–not the warmest way of regarding one’s urban comrades. Strand synthesized the flowing masses in the streets (“million-footed Manhattan”) and the “towering geometry,” exulting in the imperial splendor of Gotham’s skyscrapers, steamships, and smokestacks. In one allusive montage, he frames pedestrians and tombstones in the same way.
It’s Up to You (1943) is another government-sponsored film Strand worked on that has aged weirdly. A puzzled farmer standing in his field hears voices (“Listen, farmer”) imploring him to up his productivity (“But come on, farmer, you don’t have time to think!”) so he can feed an old lady in wartime England (“Never heard of her,” the farmer protests). Another voice joins in. “Hey farmer! Get going. I’m hungry.” “That’s a U.S. Marine” explains the narrator. Scolding a lady shopping for red meat on the black market, the movie ends with a rationing pitch sung by the Down Town Glee Club–“It’s up to you, mister / It’s up to you, sister.”
