STRAND, PAUL (1890-1976) "Mr. Bennett, West River Valley, Vermont." Silver print, 7x9 1/4 inches (17.8x23.5 cm.), flush mounted, with Strand's signature, title, date, inscription and technical notations, in ink, on mount verso. 1944; printed 1961
The inscription reads, "To Paolo and Franca Gasparini with love-Xmas 1961 from Hazel and Paul." Photographer Hazel Kingsbury, Paul Strand's third wife, married Strand in 1951. Paolo Gasparini was a Venezuelan photographer (of Italian birth) who was greatly influenced by Strand. Acquired from the Halsted Gallery, Michigan in 1990. Paul Strand: Sixty Years of Photographs, 88. Time in New England, 164.
In the 1910s, Paul Strand began photographing in New York and barely a decade later, he became recognized for his painterly and photographic talents. Strand visited New Mexico in 1926 and for three consecutive summers beginning in 1930, he returned, producing portraits of artist friends and acquaintances. There, amongst a thriving community of writers and artists, Strand developed his belief in the arresting quality, humanistic importance and photographic value of the portrait.
After a hiatus in filmmaking, Strand resumed his still photography in 1943, focusing on the surroundings, and more specifically, the people of New England. The publication "Time in New England," in which Mr. Bennett is included, began with a one-man retrospective exhibition of photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in 1945. The Department of Photography, which was newly formed, planned to publish scholarly catalogues of photographers deemed to be masters of the medium. Strand was invited by Beaumont Newhall, curator of photography, to inaugurate the series. The book, published in 1950, includes Strand's strikingly simplistic images alongside writings from notable literary New Englanders, marrying the photographs and text in a way in which they engaged and enhanced one another. "The lyric sense of nature, the stark theocratic purity, the practical sensibility, the unmatched craftsmanship, the careful affluence…all of those are clear in the photographs that Strand, the matchless craftsman, brought back from his excursions to New England." Mr. Bennett is accompanied by an excerpt from Henry David Thoreau's work "Walden," produced as a result of his need to acquire a more objective read on society through isolation, while simultaneously attaining a greater sense of self-sufficiency and self-awareness. The group of images produced by Strand reflects the history of New England from the dreams of the Puritans and Pilgrims and their attempts to create an ideal state to the spirit of the region today.
