Strand’s marriage came under increasing strain at this time. In 1949, the year he met the photographer Hazel Kingsbury, he and Virginia were divorced. In the 1930s, Kingsbury had worked for Louise Dahl-Wolfe, a photographer for Harper’s Bazaar, and during the war she enlisted with the Red Cross to photograph in Europe and the Far East. Hazel’s good humor and professional outlook appealed to Strand, and she became his collaborator, the rare person who could accept his exclusive focus on his work while ensuring the conditions in which it took place.
In 1949, Strand’s activism came to a head, culminating in protests against the reactionary turn in U.S. politics. That spring, with Aaron Copland and Clurman, he spoke on the “Effects of the Cold War on the Artist in the United States” at the National Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions Congress for World Peace and joined a call by Ben Shahn and Clifford Odets for a Bill of Rights conference to “speak up against the police state methods of certain Army and FBI officials.” The Photo League threw him a farewell party before he sailed to Europe to show Native Land at a film festival in Czechoslovakia, where it won an award. In his acceptance speech, Strand defended the Hollywood Ten, the producers, directors, and screenwriters who refused to answer HUAC’s questions about their Communist sympathies.
Strand also took part in a conference on cinema in Perugia, Italy, on the question “Do today’s films reflect the problems of modern man?” There he met Cesare Zavattini, the scriptwriter for De Sica’s 1948 neorealist classic, The Bicycle Thief, which addressed the question. Strand stayed on in Paris, where he worked on an application for a Fulbright Fellowship to make a photographic study of a French village—a project that would further his work on the sense of place. (His application was denied.) He flew back to New York on December 25, 1949, the day after he learned of his father’s death.
Over the years, Jacob Strand had become a successful businessman. His company marketed metal casters called “Domes of Silence,” to be placed under furniture legs. His bequest made it possible for Paul to live as he wished—free of the need to earn a living and far from the increasingly anti-Communist atmosphere.
Since his time in Taos with Beck, he had dreamed of depicting the life of a village in all its particularities, an idea inspired by his admiration for Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. With this in mind, Paul sailed to France with Hazel in February 1950, and they spent the next two years traveling in search of the ideal village; they never found it. Meanwhile, he took hundreds of photographs of provincial France and a way of life that would soon disappear. He and Hazel were married in Paris in 1951 and would remain there until 1955, when they bought a house in Orgeval, a small commune to the northwest of the capital. There, Paul arranged for the construction of the darkroom he had always wanted and Hazel turned her attention to the large overgrown garden.
The idea of another photo book took shape when the Strands met Claude Roy, the young French poet and Communist Party member who became his collaborator. Over the next two years, Roy would write texts to complement Strand’s images, plan the layout, and arrange for publication. Roy invited the Strands to his family home, where his rapport with the villagers made them feel that they had entered “la France profonde”—the culture of rural France as distinct from that of Paris. Strand was unusual, Roy thought: “He did not insinuate himself into French life like someone coming from the outside….He let himself drop into the taciturn depths of the French nation with the submissiveness of a pebble that falls to the bottom of a well, making all kinds of everyday discoveries on his way.”
These discoveries included melancholy landscapes, cemeteries, storefronts, and village walls, their facades unchanged apart from the marks of time. For one, In Botmeur, Finistère, France—where two buildings frame a pollarded tree that seeks to break out of its confinement—Roy composed a Verlainesque poem in imitation of its forms: “The house would like to become a tree nourished by the soil/…the tree ends up with a past that knows better than it does….”
Strand also took a number of portraits, relying on Hazel to establish a rapport with potential subjects (she spoke French; he did not). In Douarnez, a Breton fishing town, he photographed four elderly fishermen as if they were monuments to an older way of life; for Young Boy, Gondeville, France, he had his nineteen-year-old subject hold the pose while he set up his equipment. The portrait captures the youth’s annoyance at having to stay still. Known in France as Le Jeune homme en Colère, the photo seems to allude to the country’s postwar mood. For Strand, such portraits transcended their moment to reveal the core of each person. He sent a copy of the book to Rebecca for her birthday. His images, she replied, “tell me you are still the same ‘you’—that there has been no ‘falling off’ in intensity and feeling.”
La France de Profil was published in 1952. Critical response to its side-on profile was muted: “The stubborn preoccupation of Paul Strand appears to be the achieving of pictures beyond the reach of time….He aims his camera at eternity.” Strand’s portrait of the country was too static, some thought, given the contemporary taste for images plucked from life—the poetry of the streets depicted by Cartier-Bresson or in albums like Izis’s Paris des Rêves.
Knowing that his approach was best suited to a rural locale, Strand met Zavattini in Rome to discuss their working on a portrait of an Italian village. After scouting several communes near Naples (which he rejected as too poor to serve as his ideal), Strand settled on Luzzara, Zavattini’s hometown, in the Po River valley. It was not picturesque, but “the plainness was a challenge—it meant that you had to look closer.” To do so, he relied on the services of Valentino Lusetti, a sharecropper who had learned English as an American POW. Lusetti helped allay the villagers’ suspicions of Strand, took him to the local factories (where straw hats and Parmesan cheese were made by hand). He also introduced him to his family—the widowed matriarch and five brothers grouped before their home in what has become Strand’s best-known image of Italy.
Meanwhile, Hazel chronicled Paul’s activities with pictures of him at work—photographing hats, the cheese factory, or the café, while taking care to exclude signs of modernity like cars or mopeds. One day, he approached a little girl on her way to the grape harvest, an encounter she recalled decades later. “Scared of this very serious man who never smiled,” she was puzzled by his bulky camera, never having seen one, and his request to take her picture. She returned in her best dress; Paul asked her to change into something old, then placed her in front of a weathered wall and put a straw hat on her head for a portrait entitled Farmer’s Daughter, which treats her more as a type than as an individual.
For his portrait of the Lusettis, Strand posed the five brothers around their mother, an erect figure in the doorway of their home. As matriarch, she epitomizes the strength needed to endure decades of hardship on sharecroppers’ earnings. (She took Valentino’s place in the fields while he worked with Strand.) Zavattini’s text would speak in her voice to explain their past: Four of her children died in infancy, her husband died after years of politically motivated beatings, her surviving sons’ military service distanced them from one another, yet each was bound to her and to the land. Juxtaposed to Strand’s portrait of the family, the text underlines the lingering effects of the Fascist regime and World War II.
The Lusetti family portrait appeared on the cover of the book published in 1955 as Un Paese—a felicitous title in Strand’s view, in that paese means both a country and a land or village. Strand’s “lesson in humanity” came out at a propitious moment, an Italian historian notes, “when the realistic lessons of his pictures struck the right note both culturally and politically.” (In these years, artists, writers, and intellectuals like Zavattini were counting on the new postwar regionalism as a means to unify the country.) But the fine paper and beautifully printed images made the book too costly for most readers. Moreover, another critic writes, Un Paese’s “reconciliation of Strand’s solemnity with Zavattini�
�s popularism” made Luzzara look like “any village.”
Over the next twenty years, Strand would strive to portray village life as “the common denominator of all humanity.” Whether in the Outer Hebrides, Egypt, Ghana, Morocco, or Romania, he chose his subjects to emphasize the dignity of ordinary people—“the plain people of the world, in whose hands lie the destiny of civilization’s present and future well-being.” In these years, Steichen’s 1955 “Family of Man” exhibition, which portrayed the common aspects of diverse cultures, toured the world (Strand was not among the 168 American photographers included). But unlike the best-selling book that complemented Steichen’s exhibition, Strand’s books were rarely available in the United States, making him feel even more cut off from his own country.
The Strands adapted to the rhythms of life in Orgeval with the help of the Letutours, a local couple who were devoted to them. Hélène, the housekeeper, took on the task of spotting of Paul’s prints when Hazel retired to her workroom, where she made quilts. Raymond carried out Hazel’s plans to enlarge the garden. She surprised the couple by planting vegetables suited to American tastes—corn, squash, and cucumbers for dill pickles. Hazel, who was a good cook, made pies and cookies, jam from the homegrown pears, and Sunday roasts for their friends, which were followed by sessions in the living room, where they admired Paul’s latest prints. Everyone sat quietly while Hazel removed their tissue paper wrappings. He rarely spoke about his work, a friend recalled: “Talking about it shattered the illusion.” If people saw what he knew was there, he would open up; if not, he remained aloof.
At Claude Roy’s suggestion, Strand went to Paris and the provinces for another project, portraits of a variety of French people, including artists and intellectuals. It was not necessary to talk to his subjects, Strand believed. “Whether I like a person or not is not really pertinent.” Still, he was moved to meet Picasso, who expressed his gratitude to Stieglitz for bringing his work to America. Malraux was “not very warm,” but Marcel Marceau was “affable” and his wife “a real Botticelli.” His favorites were Marcel Cachin, a founder of the French Communist Party, and the Nobel laureate Frédéric Joliot-Curie, also a Communist. The book was never published because the publisher felt that too many prominent people had been left out.
By the mid-1950s, Strand was focusing his attention on Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. He was attracted to this rugged Gaelic-speaking locale after hearing its music on the radio. He and Hazel spent three months on South Uist and nearby islands, photographing this windswept land—starting with the grassy fields that give the islands their local name, Tir a’Mhurain. Once again, he took portraits of people who had endured under harsh conditions: “Here are fine people born of a rich culture hundreds of years old, tenacious in the face of all hardships.” He worried about their future: “Can they make this island and their own lives part of the world as it develops?” Hoping that these questions would emerge in collaboration with the writer Basil Davidson, Paul and Hazel studied his images after their trip to see how different pairings spoke to one another, and to Davidson’s prose. Composing the book they called Tir a’Mhurain was like making a movie, Strand thought: “a montage problem, in which a movement must be created, of variety and meaning.” It was not published until 1962, when its outlook seemed dated (a missile range had just been established on the island).
By then, the Strands were taking it upon themselves to depict ancient lands in the process of transformation. Over the next decade, as industrialization brought radical change to many societies, they spent extended periods in Egypt, Morocco, Ghana, and Romania. In 1959, they went to Egypt at the suggestion of James Aldrich, an Australian writer, who told them about the changes under Gamal Abdel Nasser and suggested the idea of a book. They chose to concentrate “on the human material the Egyptian revolution is working with,” Aldridge wrote in the introduction, “to show that in fact Egypt is still incredibly old, even at the moment when it is exhilaratingly young.” This double perspective is born out in Strand’s images. He photographed engineering feats like the Aswan Dam, a steel mill at Helwan, and the young people whose lives were being changed by the new order, along with iconic figures: a cordial sheikh, and the villagers who invited the Strands home for cups of strong coffee. A local writer praised their efforts when Living Egypt was published: “The sentiment is not of the condescending Westerner, but of the man who understands the Egyptians for what they are and what they will become.”
In the 1960s, when the promises of modernization held sway in developing countries, Strand would continue to juxtapose images of industrial facilities with portraits of the people whom they were meant to serve. Through Basil Davidson, who had written books about modern Africa, Strand received an invitation from Kwame Nkrumah, the president of Ghana, to portray his country’s transformation since independence. Strand again photographed gleaming structures (the turbines at the Volta Dam, the oil refinery at Tema), along with the workers at these sites, in an implicit statement of faith that modernization would benefit ordinary people. It is interesting that his images of Ghanaians are often less tightly composed than his earlier work, more attentive to changing realities. Ghana: An African Portrait did not appear until 1976, after Nkrumah had been deposed. Still, this portrait of Ghana under his rule, Davidson wrote, held “a wider meaning, with [the] underlying sense that is valid for the whole of independent Africa.”
As one studies the photographic record of Strand’s travels in these years, it is not always obvious that they were made possible by his partnership with Hazel. In 1971, he would write, “Over the past twenty years she has shared and helped to resolve the technical, esthetic, and above all human problems which our explorations together raised”—a fair account of her role, yet something of an understatement. Over the years, Hazel developed his negatives, spotted his prints, and handled his correspondence with museums and publishers. She also made extensive preparations for each of their trips, compiling maps and equipment, and seeing to matters like visas. On location, she sketched sites to be photographed, took notes on technical issues, and documented Paul at work, while conversing with onlookers, often in sign language. Her own photographs comprise a diary of their collaboration, which allowed him to work without distractions. “Once Paul gets under the dark cloth, he’s completely oblivious of everything,” she told a friend.
When Davidson first met the Strands, Hazel was suffering what she called “wear and tear.” (Davidson noted, “Nothing Paul and I did together was without her creative interest and support.”) At sixty-five, Paul was “heavily built, slow of movement…measured rather than slow of speech, picking words in his own style.” The couple’s rapport, Davidson thought, was based on “a long mutual trust given lively edge by the affectionate abrasions of companionship.” He sympathized with Strand as a victim of the Cold War. The FBI had tracked his movements for years; his passport was revoked from 1955 to 1958, which meant that he could not leave France. When difficulties arose about the French edition of their Hebrides book, Davidson also witnessed Strand’s intransigence when it came to defending his work. His insistence on technical excellence, he wrote, “functioned as a kind of justice towards his subject, his medium, and himself.”
In 1965, Strand received a letter from Michael Hoffman, the publisher of Aperture, a photography magazine that sought to emulate Camera Work. His introduction to Strand by the Newhalls, who were among Aperture’s founders, gave the young man a kind of pedigree. Hoffman had just published a book by Weston; now he agreed to republish Strand’s Photographs of Mexico in a new edition entitled Mexican Portfolio. When Strand returned to New York in 1967, Hoffman struggled to meet his standards. He found the one photogravure press with vintage machinery that allowed the printer to work by hand, as well as handmade paper from France and a lacquer that would give Strand’s prints the desired luminosity. With this edition of the Mexican Portfolio, limited to one thousand copies, Strand began a collaboration with Hoffman tha
t would lead to his again becoming known in the United States.
That year, exhibitions of his photographs were held at the Worcester (Massachusetts) Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Sunset Center in Carmel, California. The following year, Dorothy Norman established the Stieglitz Center at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with Michael Hoffman as adviser—at which point Hoffman began working with Strand on plans for a full-scale retrospective. More exhibitions followed, in Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United States. The Strands decided to rent an apartment in New York from Paul’s friend Jim Aronson, the founder of the left-leaning National Guardian.
In these years, Paul kept in touch with Beck and sent her copies of all his books, including the 1967 Mexican Portfolio. Writing to console her after Bill’s death, he asked her to leave the portfolio to the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts. By return, she sent two of her photographs of him and gave a third to the Beinecke. “I seem to move in a dream in some darkened landscape,” she wrote, “going through motions of duty and responsibility.” Yet she was glad to know of Paul’s successes. His reply months later said how busy he had been and applauded her efforts to set things in order. The letter arrived after her death. Otto Pitcher wrote to say that Beck had wanted Paul to have a small white shell that he had given her years before. Paul agreed that this keepsake be sent to New York and asked Pitcher to make certain that her copy of the Mexican Portfolio made its way to the museum, a matter that preoccupied him until he learned that it had reached its destination.
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