ABSTRACT
In the visual arts, the field containing the greatest number of masterpieces yet to be "discovered"—which is to say, given serious attention, appropriate commentary, and adequate exhibition, preservation, and publication—is that of still photography. Photography, of all the arts that now claim our attention, remains the one with the smallest intellectual constituency. To think about photographs the way one thinks about paintings or poems or movies is a habit that remains alien to a great many people who are otherwise very intelligent about the arts. Thus, the large retrospective exhibition devoted to the work of Paul Strand that is now installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art will be an event of capital importance to connoisseurs of photographic art, but it is difficult to know what the larger art public will make of it. An aesthetic program has been subsumed in a more concentrated fidelity to the subject.
