The category of “visual skills” does not apply in the usual way for this assignment because I did not have to create any imagery. The category does apply, however, in the sense of applying those skills in looking carefully at an image created by someone else. I will give my comments on how successfully I did that in the “Quality of outcome” sub-section.
The other technical skills employed for this assignment were connected with my writing ability. I am confident that my writing is clear and cogent, and does not suffer from too many basic faults.
Quality of outcome
I am quite pleased with the outcome of the assignment in a number of respects. The first of these is that I gave myself the time to spend just looking at Strand’s image and to explore it fully. Wall Street, 1915 is a picture that has stayed in my mind for many years and I have never really articulated to myself, much less anyone else, why it had such a hold in my imagination. It was a kind of gift for me to be able to give it sustained attention and help to answer my own question: why do I care about this picture?
I was not interested in putting together a collection of views and insights lifted from other interpreters, but wanted to do the close work of doing my own interpretive work. I think I have achieved that.
Demonstration of creativity
I made an effort to delve into some of the intertextuality that Wall Street, 1915 suggested to me. The first of these was Fritz Lang’s film, Metropolis, so it was exciting to me to find out that Strand himself had returned to the scene of his still image to give it a place in his own film, Manhatta.
I also used my imagination in looking at the walkers and thinking about what their postures, attitudes and clothing might suggest. I did the same with the bold lines of the shadows, buildings and sidewalks.
Can I be sure that my views and interpretations are accurate? Of course not. What would the standard be and which view would trump—the studium of Strand (Barthes’ Operator), my own assessment and punctum, or someone else’s? But did I enjoy the activity and writing the reflective essay? Absolutely.
Context
The context for the essay is a course on photographic Context and Narrative, and the assignment has taught me something about both aspects of the title. I have seen how Wall Street, 1915 found its context in a number of places and I can appreciate that it would have been apprehended differently in each of them—on the wall of Stieglitz’s New York gallery, in the pages of Camera Work with other early examples of Modernist photography, as a few seconds of homage in a movie, and in collections and retrospectives of Strand’s work over the last 100 years.
I have tried to tease out some of the more striking aspects of the photograph’s narrative by entering the little world inside its frame and seeing how the various elements work together to make a coherent and powerful visual story.
Just as important for me has been the chance to consider my own context as a viewer / interpreter and to have the chance to apply new tools that help me to understand and articulate my own response to a famous image that has stuck with me for years.
“Paul Strand’s 1915 photograph of Wall Street workers passing in front of the monolithic Morgan Trust Company can be seen as the quintessential representation of the uneasy relationship between early twentieth-century Americans and their new cities.” (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1995:230).
Wall Street, 1915 is indeed a picture full of tension, simultaneously celebrating the accomplishments of the modern world while fearing what they might imply.
The photograph was one of six Strand images published by Alfred Stieglitz in Camera Work (Strand and Barberie, 2014:14) that launched his career as an artist and marked a departure from his earliest work in the Pictorialist style (Jeffrey, 2008:114). Leaving behind “his faltering attempts at fogbound, neo-romantic landscapes in the nineteen-tens” (Dickson, 2016), Strand embraced Modernism in scenes from urban life and experiments with abstraction, perhaps influenced by Cubism (Koetzle, H.-M., 2002:170). The influence of the picture was significant and it has been credited with doing “much to lead American photography toward sharp-focus realism as well as abstraction, toward urban subjects and the machine aesthetic” (Milton W. Brown, cited in Wall Street, New York, 1915, s.d.).
More than a century later Wall Street, 1915 can easily be recognised as portraying a daily commute, with people walking to or from their place of work while the sun is low in the early morning sky. It depicts an urban scene, with background architecture that is both modern and clearly American rather than European. The building that serves as a backdrop for the commuters appears very institutional and suggests the intimidating power of a bank, major corporation, or government.
The frame is heavy with geometry and leading lines—a deceptively simple image containing little or no detail in the shadows. The print is somewhat muddy, with deep shades of black but no true whites. This may have been a conscious choice on the part of the photographer, given that the highly-directional side lighting should have been capable of producing both deep shadows and brilliant highlights.
The figures in the scene are all walking in the same direction and there is a palpable sense of deliberate slowness. One man—few of the walkers appear to be female—has shouldered a cane or walking stick at an angle contrary to all the others in the frame, a lone working-class punctum whose presence among the better-dressed walkers might prick the attention of the careful viewer (see Barthes, 2010:27). The commuters are pacing themselves, perhaps in no particular rush to begin the work day.
If the commuters are in no hurry, the solid stone mass of the building behind them appears positively immovable. Where there should be windows, deep, shadowed rectangles suggest unseeing eyes or open graves—Strand himself later spoke of its “sinister windows—blind shapes” (Jeffrey, 2008:115). The imposing geometry of the structure dominates the street scene, its scale a display of power that dwarfs the organic shapes moving in front of it.
Oblivious to the dark heaviness beside and above them, the people walk casually into a rising sun with its early light full in their faces. The dawn connotes the promise of a new day and perhaps carries with it additional promises of knowledge and hope for the future. The glare in their eyes might not allow them a view of where they are going, but they may follow the orderly lines laid out for them on the pavement. The walkers can probably not see each other very well and, even though some travel in small clusters, this is largely a collection of individuals. They move in a common direction but they are not together.
The people are the only non-geometric, organic shapes, but they too are given a kind of geometry by their own shadows that distinguish them from the vertical lines of the monolith behind, long arms pointing backward and slowing their progress.
Wall Street, 1915 has all the dramatic feel of a movie set, looking much like a production still from a silent film backlot. The same idea may have occurred to Strand himself because, although he later claimed that he did not know how he had made the picture (Strand and Barberie, 2014:14), he returned to the location and reproduced a close facsimile of the scene in the 1921 film Manhatta (1921). Just a few years later director Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) would offer a full-blown dystopian story of the evils of modern, mechanized city life, with great attention to the scale of buildings versus human figures—humans dominated by their own creations. Lang admitted that “the film was born from my first sight of the skyscrapers in New York in October 1924. […] I looked into the streets—the glaring lights and the tall buildings—and there I conceived Metropolis” (Minden and Bachmann, cited in Metropolis (1927 film) 2020).
But Wall Street, 1915 is not quite a dystopia. It is something more complex, managing to show “Strand’s willingness to accommodate documentary realism and abstraction within the same frame” (Paul Strand Artworks & Famous Photography, s.d.) and it is this tension that continues to give the photograph its power. The picture portrays an everyday scene of commuters heading to their place of work in an orderly, unhurried way leaving little trace of motion blur on the photographic plate. The walkers wear clothing that might be suitable for a cool spring or fall day, but they will enjoy a few moments to soak in whatever warmth may be had from the strong morning light.
If the reality conveyed by the image is common and reassuring, however, the abstraction is less so. The scene is crossed with graphic, sharp diagonals and inky rectangular pits that stay in the mind’s eye after the viewer has turned away—the kind of scene that Barthes might call subversive, “not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks” (Barthes, 2010: 38). The daily commute is played out against a menacing backdrop that hints physically and visually at the power the rising city and its economy have over the workers. It would not be too many more years before the same dark windows were witness to the explosion of an anarchist bomb (1920) and the stock market crash (1929) that would ruin so many hopes.
Strand’s workers stroll forever, enjoying the benefits of living in the great city. If they are aware of any tension, their pace does not show it. But the signs are there.
References
Barthes, R. (2010) Camera Lucida: reflections on photography. (Paperback ed.) New York: Hill and Wang.
Context and Narrative 