In 1950, the photographer Paul Strand left the United States, frightened by the rise of McCarthyism and the harassment carried out against artists suspected of sympathy with communism. The photographer has always been on the left and has signed several militant films such as NativeLand (1942), which traces the fight of American workers for their rights, despite repression by the bosses and the police.
By choosing exile at the age of 60, Paul Strand (1890-1976) distanced himself from his country of origin, but also from the films and formal essays for which he remained forever famous: black and white photos with innovative framing, where the games on the shadows cast by the buildings and the geometric architecture celebrate the new and teeming city of the XXe century, while laying the foundations of modernist photography.
Farmers and craftsmen
From France, where he settled, Paul Strand traveled, seeking everywhere what obsessed him: an ideal village where he could photograph people, buildings and landscapes, in order to translate the spirit and the memory of place. All without giving in to the accident or the event, far from the decisive moment dear to Henri Cartier-Bresson and the photojournalism published by the magazine press of the time.
His stays in different countries of Europe and Africa, in search of rural communities that face the upheavals of history and the capitalist economy, are at the center of an exhibition presented at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, in Paris. We see the magnificent prints of Paul Strand, precise and restrained, of a contemplative depth, and the books he published while collaborating each time with a writer.
It is in France that Paul Strand signs his most famous image: while he is traveling the country, he comes across a young peasant in overalls in the profile of Apollo, in Gondeville, in Charente, whose mute anger pierces the picture. The boy who had become a man would confide, years later, how much he suffered then from the hard life on the farm and the incessant reprimands of his mother… He will figure prominently in the book published in 1952 by Paul Strand with the writer Claude Roy , France in profile, before making the cover of the book The world at my doorstep released in 1994.
But it is in Italy, in the Po plain, that Paul Strand finds what he is looking for. The village of Luzzara, which resisted fascism before becoming a bastion of communism after the war, is also the birthplace of neorealist filmmaker Cesare Zavattini, the screenwriter of bicycle thief, directed by Vittorio De Sica in 1948. Cesare Zavattini will write, in 1955, the introduction to the book A paese (A country).
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