What do the poignant face of Blind woman photographed on a New York street in 1916 and the circle of bowls taken from above and in tight framing to compose a Abstraction The same year? Between the vertical lines of the monumental facades and the tiny silhouettes of Wall Street emerging from a 1915 photograph, and the geometric mass of a New Mexico church photographed in 1931? The purity of vision, without a doubt. Associated with two photographic traditions considered antagonistic, the formalist and the social trends, Paul Strand (1890-1976) seems to have managed to fuse the two, both in his landscapes and his portraits. Sometimes abstract, his pure vision is always true.
A great portraitist of the everyday man, the American photographer is considered one of the pioneers of the straight photography (pure photography) and one of the proponents of the modernist avant-garde, cast a humanist gaze on the faces and working bodies he encountered during his travels, from Mexico between 1932 and 1934 to his settling in the French countryside in 1955, without ever abandoning a certain aesthetic sensibility. This is undoubtedly what gives his images so much power, as evidenced by these facades where laundry, brooms, or harnesses hang, which, with great economy of means, speak volumes about the lives of peasants and ordinary people…
Paul Strand or the balance of forces – Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation
Until April 23
79, rue des archives, Paris 3e
France
Stéphanie Dulout
