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Paul Strand’s Living Labor

Context and contribution: Stephanie Schwartz’s article appears in ARTMargins, a triquarterly print journal devoted to contemporary art in a global context and to examining artistic practice on the emerging global margins. 'Paul Strand's Living Labor', an investigation of Strand's film work in Mexico, is one of the first essays in the journal to examine the pre-1945 period.

Research imperatives and process: Complicating claims that Strand "found" politics in Mexico through an analysis of his work in the US since 1917, Schwartz’s article addresses how histories of modernism (and Strand) fetishized geopolitics and failed to look at their own models of history. Based on archival research at the Centre for Creative Photography, this article offers the first extended study of Strand’s filmic practice. Drawing out the complex relationship between documentary film and photography in the 1930s, also a subject rarely addressed in current histories of documentary practice in the US, this article models a study of mass media in the US in the 1930s that is not over-determined by the Farm Security Administration’s photographic archive.