Getty Museum

Still Life with Contessa Cigarette Boxes, Twin Lakes, Connecticut

Date

negative 1916–1917; print 1917

Medium

Silver platinum print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

Since his early Pictorial work, Paul Strand favored platinum prints for their ability to record the image in crisp detail while offering a richness and broad range of tones. However, like many photographers of the time, he found it increasingly difficult to secure platinum paper, which, for economic reasons, was no longer being manufactured. Instead, a commercial silver-platinum paper, known as Satista, briefly became a substitute material. It was cheaper both to produce and to purchase and similar in look and feel to the original platinum paper. This arrangement of Contessa cigarette boxes is an exercise in form and light. Strand removes the objects from their everyday context in order to exploit their graphic qualities (such as the bold black-and-white stripes), while at the same time exploring their dimensionality within the composition. By juxtaposing the rectangular boxes with the circular bowls, he creates a relationship that is not predicated by content or subject matter, but simple form. In this approach Strand is aligning himself with certain principles of modern art, in that he is attempting to free the objects from their given use or associated identity in order to expose their true form. In other words, the composition becomes completely objective. For Strand, photography, unlike painting, offered "absolute unqualified objectivity" that he believed to be "the very essence" of the medium ("Photography," _Camera Work_, June 1917). Originally published in _Paul Strand_, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum by Anne M. Lyden (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), 20. ©2005, J. Paul Getty Trust.

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