han Lyons : ark published interview with Paul Strand 1965 Interviewed in 1965 a pot of lyons research forthe crtcal anthology Photographers on Photography ay Strand cases hisfrmatv studs with Lewis Hine ot the Ethical Culture Schooin New Yo isco gay ‘aprism lens to make portraits of people who were SCTE IY wer being photographed, nd bis rarely ar nal ioe Ns exept fo that tev osu abou San apg toimagecnd tert combination ond addresses thecnnaticquatesof Sands phrogapsadptongayy books. Paul Strand: One aspect of the early work, which was an innovation at the time, was to try touse the physical movement of people or traffic in an abstract way—for example in “Wall Street”—to try to organize the people in relation to the big windows. That was a conscious experimentation. That leads to a whole different area of a theoretical approach to Photog- raphy that I consider important, Nathan Lyons: That's primarily what I'm concerned about. PS:I'll put it this way—Time in New England was of course made somewhat differently from any of the later books, but it was a starting point for the problem of bringing photo- Sraphs together with text in such a way that the total meaning of the book is enriched. It you have only the text of Time in New England and no photographs, that wouldn't relly work very well, and if you had only the photographs and no text, it would be ese interesting, less meaningful than what we have. In fact when Charlie Duell (Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, Publishers}, who had given us the contract to make the book, finally reneged on the pub- lication of it, he said, "I will publish a book of photographs by Strand but I won't publish the book with the text.” This was after Nancy [Newhall] had spent a year or more digging this stuff out, and I said without any hesitation that I wouldn't consider such a proposition feaagmemnt beac this was the book, this isit, and we believe in this, and it would have a shown litte bit naan asked C0 vote for q— pS; Because there is a relationship, Ni: Wel, it’s a cinematic concept essentially, pS: That's right. And nobody has said anything about that yet. Time in New England. The progression of my own teaching is to bring students to sequential concerns, not necessarily NU: Well you should come to my workshop because fu the existence of an individual picture, but how it relates in a progression with a group of photographs, and actually it probably will be, in time, the most dominant preoccupation ‘of a photographer. Ps: Yes, well it needs to be, and 've tried doing it from my point of view, but one thing in connection with Time in New England, this idea of relating text written by New Englanders over a period of years was her idea, and we carried it out together. Well, then it led to these books in Europe, which were something else again, but related, ‘Now it's becoming a more conscious technique, a more conscious problem. So that for instance La France de profil began as a search on the part of my wife and me to find a village in France where we could make a book about a village because that had been in my mind for twenty years. I could have probably done it in Taos in the thirties if I had been aware of jt, but I wasn't quite, nor was T ready to do anything like that, but it would have been a very interesting book. There were still people in Taos, and Taos was still intact. It would have been a portrait of that time—bad times in the West. Well anyway, I didn't, but it stuck in my head, and when I went to France in 1949, 1950, it was to make such a book—to take a small community, call it a village, and make a book. around that village. I think basically it came out of Spoon River Anthology, which was part of my time as a young man growing up in America, only I wanted to make a book about living people, not people who were in a graveyard. So we looked, we traveled all over France, and really because we didn’t know France well enough, and because we were not clear enough, we never found that village. There was always something that was not right. The French shut up their houses as soon as it's dark, and in the villages there are no lights in the street, and this threw us to some extent too. Then there's the fact that you don’t get to know French people quite as readily as you do elsewhere. As soon as I got to France, in 1949, I asked a writer there—he's a friend of mine—“do you know a poet who would be interested in working on a book like that,” and he intro- duced me to Claude Roy, a young poet and friend of Paul Eluard. I began photographing in 1950, while we were looking for this village. We traveled all over France, from Brittany down to Alsace, and I began to photograph those things in France which seemed to me to be especially French. Then we went over and visited Claude Roy and his mother, She had a Je some portraits of people whom he knew in the neighborhood. I had been mal n, too, in Brittany—the old ‘man with the white stick and so on—and out of this material finally we fashioned this book. Claude himself did most of the fashioning, He has great skill in putting things together and he wrote or compiled the text; part of itis his own portrait and part of itis a compilation. He ets full credit really for putting that book together and that’s the way that book happened. ‘The Italian book happened differently, because I still hadn't found this village, you see? The French book is not a book about any one particular spot, Unt Pwese finally became that vineyard near Cognac, and through him Ir 1g portraits with a pris 119 Corto Thorst eerecame the concretization of the idea of photographing a village, We met Zavattn, ens and I proposed that we make this book together A jy But you don't need a writer. You don't need. book in Rome through mutual frie z seen some of the photographs, he said, any text sad" don't age, H tink the text is very important, and I don't want to mae y book of photographs. want to make book about a village in Italy witha ext, and 4 jig itvery much ifyou woul write the text.” Well he said, “I'm interested inthe idea of making havit a book about a village because T've always wanted to make a film about what happens from cone street corner in Rome for instance,” so his thinking was already in that direction, and | a fine idea, I can make that film, but I would like to make this said “Well that’s fine, th i book with you, so where should we start?” He said there are thousands of villages, so we went first to a place he recommended, with the name of Gaeta, which is between Rome and Naples. We spent about ten days there, and I began to photograph right away. It was very interesting, but it was a bombed town, heavily bombed in the war, and people were living in ruins. The poverty was something terrific; women were offering us their babies, to just take them away and bring them up because they couldn't. After some time, we went back to Rome, with the feeling that this was not the place in New England because it was too special—not a typical ‘Photographs by PAUL STRAND situation on account of many factors—so Teac died by Nac Newall we told Zavattini this, and I said if you use Gaeta, you've got to have me photograph at least two other villages. As one place, it won't Cover Time in New Englund by Paul Strand and do for what we want, This was already in ancy Newhall (Nev York: Oxford UP, 1950). November, and he said well, why don’t you go and see Luzzara, where I was born? It's up north, and he said, “I go back there whenever I can, I never forget my village, and I have a house there as a matter of fact, and whenever I can get away from Rome I go” That in itself ary place. It had no architec- erected. That gave you some was an interesting fact, so we went, and we found a very ord tural interest, and it was fat, except for the dikes that had bee aw; however, we met a clevation at least, We were rather disappointed isually in what we 1. made two or three photographs that arein the book, We decided, les go back to this place, Lev's dig into this place, Why the hell few friends of his there, and they drove w: eto bi beings live there, and life goes on there, and our job ein the does ith teresting? Hum. spring, and that’s what we did the elements which make it up, So we said allright, well yo back Zavattini came ta mect us, and we had a press conference in the local cafe. The news people and all the townspeople yathered around because he's their great aul distinguished son. They love him and he loves them, We walked through the town, and he showed tsé this thing and that thing, We're looking down the street, and one wonelered how the hell you could photograph. Then he went off to Rome—he's a very busy man—and left us in Lusarra, We had a young fellow as an interpreter. He might have been an Italian prisoner of war in America, so he became our contact with the people. We started to work, and we worked for about five weeks, and then came back again for two weeks in the fall, and that was it, photographically speaking, Then I developed the negatives and 1 made the dummy, In this case, I put the pictures together and showed them to Zavattini, He had a few questions, and we made a few changes, and then he wrote the text by going to Luzzara, getting on the back of the motorcycle of cour interpreter, and going around and talking to the people that I had photographed. Out of his conversation with them came the text, so the whole thing has an organic quality. We were having a young woman, later in Rome, translate Zavattin’s text for us one afternoon, into English, and suddenly she turned, and said, “You know, this reminds me of Spoon River Anthology®” out of the perfectly clear sky. This was another step in “film on paper,” let's say. It’s not a bad idea. I's very relevant. NL: No, it's very important to what's beginning to happen more and more. PS: Although it wasn't always conscious. I mean I hadn't been thinking about film on paper at all, Not at all. NL: think you can go back to even the first concerns in the first published group of pho- tographs with the people, and also The Mexican Portfolio is a vignette—you know I come to it not knowing you, just having things to observe—then the period of ten years working. with film, and then the first major body of work I see isa book, which to me is cinematic in intent, and I begin to become concerned about the continuation of cinematic ideas. From Nathan Lyons, unpublished interview with Paul Strand, New York City, audio record- ing, Summer 1965. VC hone