American Art Collaborative

Paul Strand took this photograph of a town hall in Washington, New Hampshire, during his travels through New England in 1946 for a book project with Nancy Newhall. Time in New England (1950) was Strand’s first photographic book, and it provides a visual and textual “portrait” of America’s northeastern-most states. Strand first articulated such a photographic vision in a 1943 grant application to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, in which he proposed to create “a portrait of a particular American environment in terms of the character of the land itself, the people who live in it, the things they have made and built.” Strand’s 106 photographs in Time in New England picture a variety of subjects, including barns, seascapes, rural landscapes, and local residents, accompanied by excerpted texts—selected by Newhall—from New England authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Samuel Adams, and Robert Frost. Strand took the photographs during trips to New England in 1944 and again in 1946, when, along with visits to New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, he also spent six weeks in Maine with his friend John Marin at the painter’s Cape Split house. Erected in 1787, this New Hampshire town hall exhibits the austere beauty of New England vernacular architecture; Strand’s photograph, with its unembellished depiction of the building’s campanile and parallel flagpole, further emphasizes the starkness and simplicity its subject. Strand was a member of the Alfred Stieglitz circle, a group of American modernists that included Marin, Max Weber, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Arthur Dove, who had coalesced around the influential photographer and gallery owner. Inaugurating a new mode of “straight” photography that would supplant the soft focus and atmospheric effects of the then-dominant style of photography known as Pictorialism, Strand created photographs as early as the mid-1910s of unmanipulated clarity. In so doing, he offered a formal language through which to pursue his uniquely modernist inventions within the medium of photography. For Strand, the abstract potential of the photograph could be found in the most common of subjects—bowls, chairs, wooden fence posts—and Town Hall represents the artist’s continuing pursuit of the modernist idiom in the vernacular landscape. The composition of the photograph—the tilt and cropping of the building and the flagpole—points to Strand’s exploration of form and abstraction. The photographer tilted his subject not only to the right but also slightly back from the picture plane, thereby further abstracting the rectangular and triangular shapes that make up the building. Moreover, due to his severe cropping, only the bottom two-thirds of the cupola and a portion of the upper story of the two-story town hall is pictured; the left side of the building is even more fully cropped and shrouded in shadow. This device not only abstracts his subject but also offers a timeless, even iconic, account of the central building of a New England town (certainly a goal of his book with Newhall) by refusing any contextual details that could situate the subject in the present day—one year after the end of World War II. Similarly, the wooden pole that echoes the tilt of the bell tower is given no context—no flag to fly. Instead, it functions in the composition as a purely formal device that flattens against the clapboard facade behind it, compressing the distance between the two. Finally, this vintage print illustrates Strand’s mastery of the photographic medium. The thin silver lines that depict the muntins in the town hall’s windows reveal the photographer’s immense skill as a printer and illustrate his ability to create forms that can move simultaneously between monolithic abstraction and representational subject.Sharon Corwin