Chapter 11 Over Here, Over There, Down Below: American Photographers Confront the Great War
In: Picturing AmericaSearch for other papers by David M. Lubin in
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Abstract*
Long admired for its formal brilliance, Paul Strand’s luminous photographWall Street (1915) is a landmark of early modernism. Yet its relevance to the artist’s vehement opposition to American involvement in the First World War has largely been ignored. This essay investigates the social-historical context of Wall Street and a handful of other striking images by Strand and his contemporaries as the war abroad threatened to engulf the homeland. In keeping with the tenets of early twentieth-century realism, Strand’s images are place-specific, not generalized or generic. Wall Street, it is true, comments acerbically on capitalism in general, but it does so by alluding specifically to the headquarters of the J.P. Morgan bank, which had a major financial stake in the outcome of the Great War. Looking at Strand’s WWI-era photography in light of other place-specific visual artifacts of the day by the likes of Childe Hassam, Edward Steichen, Ernest Brooks, and Lewis Hine, we can better understand how his photography staked out a leftist position in the heated political debates of the day.