Traces, Images, and Fictions: Paul Strand in Mexico, 1932-34

Traces, Images and Fictions:

Paul Strand in Mexico, 1932-34

This article analyzes an individual, a context, and an experience. The individual is the photographer and filmmaker Paul Strand, widely recognized and occasionally criticized as one of the great modernist photographers of the twentieth century.¹ The context is Mexico from 1932-34. In these years, Strand worked in Mexico amidst state-led efforts to construct a "new" national culture following the social upheavals and military conflicts associated with the Mexican Revolution.² The experience was Strand's effort to create a visual record of Mexico documenting what he thought of as its unique character, while furthering its "revolutionary" transformation through photography and filmmaking.

Paul Strand's Mexican work consists of approximately one hundred and seventy five photographic negatives and sixty platinum prints, twenty of which Strand published in his 1940 Photographs of Mexico, re-released in 1967 as The Mexican Portfolio.³ While in Mexico Strand also played a major role in producing, photographing and directing the film Redes (1935), released with English subtitles as The Wave (1937). These efforts were well received in Mexico, at least in part because they conformed to the nationalist ethos of the 1930's. This was a significant achievement for a non-Spanish speaking norteamericano with limited knowledge of Mexico. Looking back in 1967, the great muralist David Alfaro Siquieros claimed that

Like Serge Eisenstein who preceded him, Strand made an outstanding contribution, notably with his film "Redes" (Nets), a work of dynamic realism, emotional intensity, and social outlook. It is a masterpiece, a classic of the Mexican, and by extension, of the Latin American milieu. This is equally true of the photographs that make up the Mexican Portfolio.⁴

Indeed, Siquieros considered Strand an "American-Mexican" who created "the most objective art of our time." The caricaturist, artist and archaeologist Miguel Covarrubias described Strand's Photographs of Mexico as "the finest job of reproduction of the finest photographs ever made of Mexico," and the advance sale subscription list for this volume contained many of Mexico City's intellectual and political elites.⁵

By the time Strand arrived in Mexico, he was an advocate of "straight photography," that is, photography prohibiting manipulation of the negative.⁶ Whether one accepts, qualifies or rejects modernist ideals of straight photography, it is necessary to recognize that all film images involve complex theoretical and practical issues at the levels of production, circulation and reception. These are reconfigured as technology changes, as for example with the introduction of cinema, or more recently digital technology.⁷ A full exploration of these issues lies beyond the scope of this essay. However, Strand's ambivalent position as a norteamericano sympathetic to revolutionary nationalism, as well as his lifelong insistence on the objectivity of his art, makes his Mexican experience an intriguing place to begin a consideration of the links between individuals, contexts and images.⁸

Strand's trip to Mexico began in response to an invitation from his friend the composer Carlos Chávez, who had recently been appointed the director of the Fine Arts Department of the Secretariat of Public Education (SEP). For Strand as tourist, Mexico provided a temporary escape from a United States he perceived as increasingly restrictive in cultural and political terms.⁹ In this respect, his experience must be situated within an extended movement across international borders of people and cultures, a multi-directional flow of ideas and practices as well as labor, goods and services.¹⁰ On a more personal note, Strand also fled the disappointments involved in the dissolution of a sixteen year relationship with his mentor Alfred Stieglitz, a divorce from his first wife and a failed Guggenheim Fellowship application.¹¹ In Mexico, Strand enjoyed a successful exhibition of his photographs in Mexico City and obtained work, originally at the level of elementary school art instructor and ultimately as the Director of Photography...