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Krippner, James. Paul Strand in Mexico. Historical essay by Alfonso Morales Carrillo, with additional texts by Katherine Ware, Leo Hurwitz and David Alfaro Siqueros. Process notes by Anthony Montoya. Including an archive catalog. New York: Fundación Televisa/Aperture, 2011.356 pp. ISBN: 9781-5971-1137-9
The Aperture Foundation's publication of this gorgeous volume documents how Paul Strand's contributions as a major modemist photographer emerged from his pathbreaking documentation in a Mexican film industry that he helped to establish. As the first and most significant of Strand's two residences in Mexico ocurred 1932 through 1934, these stand at the center of the historical and aesthetic essays that this volume prints along with the complete archive of Strand's Mexican stills and negatives, which Televisa has subsequently acquired. Strand's work is set in the context of Mexico's political and aesthetic history, including a film industry that invariably includes references to Pancho Villa's famed engagement of Hollywood-based camera crews to film battles that his troops obligingly refought at the lighting crews' request. A new direction came with the end of the armed phase of the Mexican Revolution in 1921: Alfonso Morales Carrillo's essay acknowledges the irony of employing artists and intellectuals from other latitudes to construct or recover authentic "Mexican" culture (244). By the late 1920s, a steady stream of travelers between New York and Mexico fueled what the New York Times termed "the enormous vogue of all things Mexican." That nation's image as a focus of social change and artistic innovation drew art photographers and international filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Paul Strand in the early 1930s. The volume documents how these two years in Mexico, prefaced by his work in Taos, transformed Strand's career. The move to Mexico let Strand expand on his nascent and developing themes in Southwestern landscape, architecture, and portraiture. These all contributed, in turn, to Strand's work on the film "Redes" ( 1935), a classic in the history of Mexican cinema, released in English as "Waves" in 1936: a DVD of "Redes," with English subtitles, accompanies the book's text.
In the volume's lead essay, James Krippner skillfully weaves socio-political and cultural history with aesthetic theory to reveal how Paul Strand, the New York-bom only child of Bohemian Jewish immigrants, became a "romantic antimodemist" who first headed...