SOUL OF A NEW MACHINE

Spotlight

Insecurity can nurture inhibition. But, for early photographers, it was a motivator. Photography's status as painting's poor relation created a community among its advocates and fueled questions, too: Was photography an art? A tool for social change? A science? Journalism? Did its images actually capture unadulterated reality?

The passions issuing from these debates helped foster the romance surrounding the new form and its practitioners, such as Paul Strand, whose obsession with the lens began when he was a teenager at New York's Ethical Culture School, where he studied with Lewis Hine, who so memorably documented the conditions of Ellis Island immigrants and the horrors of child labor at the beginning of the century.

Next month, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art will showcase the work that grew from Strand's devotion with an exhibition of about 60 of his early prints, made between 1913 and 1917. Many of these classics have not been assembled in the same place since their original showing at Alfred Stieglitz's renowned 291 gallery on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Together they embody the dreams and challenges driving those artists in the midst of discovering just what cameras could do.

There are marvels of many varieties: images which render light and shadow as provocatively as the masterpieces of Cubism and Constructivism; still lifes—including the remarkable Jug and Fruit—which remain among the most beautiful of all time. Other Strand shots manage to be both particular and universal, evoking an absolutely specific time and place while portending still-evolving myths and perceptions. Strand's famous picture Wall Street, New York (1915), filled with loneliness and a contemporary-seeming urban alienation, is a stunning example of modernist technique and human prescience. It is a timeless record of American experience, the kind Strand spoke of trying to capture. At the time of his death in 1 976, he had lived up to his intention. Inhibitions confined lesser souls.

INGRID SISCHY