Paul Strand 1890-1976

The photographer to Nancy and Beaumont Newhall, 1960

Edwynn Houk Gallery, Chicago

Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1981 

Other prints of this image:

Paul Strand and Claude Roy, La France de Profil (Aperture, 2001), cover and p. 79

Michael E. Hoffman, ed., Paul Strand: Sixty Years of Photographs (Aperture, 1976), p. 131

Maren Strange, ed., Paul Strand, Essays on His Life and Work (Aperture, 1990), pl. 68

Paul Strand (Aperture, 1987), p. 55

The photograph offered here was first published in Paul Strand's and Claude Roy's evocative volume of life in France, La France de Profil (Lausanne: La Guilde de Livre, 1952).  Disillusioned by McCarthyism and the political situation of the United States, Strand moved to Europe in the early 1950s and sought new subjects for his lens.  He initially hoped to photograph a quintessential French village, one singular place whose people, landscapes, and buildings could capture the essence of the entire nation.  Instead, he traveled and took pictures throughout the country, eventually synthesizing a number of images to create a composite portrait of French life. 

Rather than photograph the cliché or the famous, Strand concentrated on the details and rituals of the ordinary man: cafés, shop windows and doors, harnesses on a wall, marshes, a horse-drawn cart, a bunch of grapes.  The image offered here, a quintessential French shopfront, 'Shop, Le Bacares, Pyrénées-Orientale, was used, fittingly, on the book's cover.

This photograph comes originally from the collection of Nancy and Beaumont Newhall.  Beaumont Newhall was the first Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, and first met Strand in 1936 when he was gathering prints for the Museum's 1937 history of photography exhibition.  During World War II, his wife Nancy replaced him as curator while he served in the Army, and in 1945 was responsible--despite strong opposition within the Museum to treating photography as art--for the Museum's first retrospective exhibition devoted entirely to the work of one photographer--Paul Strand.

Nancy Newhall and Strand also worked together on the 1950 book, Time in New England, presaging France en Profil.  Strand found combining his photographs with meaningful text appealing, and he called the experience '. . .a major turning point in my development' (Paul Strand: Sixty Years of Photographs, p. 30).  The Newhalls and Strand often exchanged letters, and Beaumont Newhall was a guest at Strand's home in Orgeval, France, in 1959.

It is believed that there are four prints of this image extant.  An early print is at the Paul Strand Archive.  The print offered here is likely a 1950s print, printed no later than 1959. Two prints from the 1960s are known to exist.