Stimson Photography and God

mson
blake
Photography and God

Blake Stimson
Photography and God1

Blake Stimson
In considering the Idea of the state, we must not have any particular states or
particular institutions in mind; instead, we should consider the Idea, this actual God,
in its own right.
G.W.F. Hegel2
1. Thank you to Stephanie Schwartz and Barnaby

Haran for originally inviting me to think further
about Strands career and to the audience they drew
at UCL who responded to the original paper. My
thoughts on the topic also benefitted from
audiences at the University of Illinois, Chicago and
DePaul University as well as the careful reading and
thoughtful commentary of Becky Bivens, Marissa
Baker, and Elise Archias in Chicago and Steve
Edwards and other anonymous readers on behalf of
Oxford Art Journal.
2. G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right,
ed. by Allen W. Wood; trans. by H.B. Nisbet
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991),
p. 279.
Vassals of the common man
On the most general level, the comfortable label romantic socialist

sometimes applied to Paul Strand seems fair enough (Fig. 1). However, if
this term is to have any usable social, political, or cultural traction in the
post-romantic, post-socialist world, we find ourselves in today we need to
test its mettle by upping the stakes and detaching it from two of our most
inimical liberal evasions: our jaded look askance at left humanism, on the
one hand, and our ardent craning toward what Michael Lowy and Robert
Sayre call the star of revolt and its dark twin, the black sun of
melancholy, on the other hand.3 This essay aims to see through the muddle
of these critical habits of mind and heart and sketch a different set of
3. Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism

Against the Tide of Modernity (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2002), p. 18.
Fig. 1. Ned Scott, photograph of Paul Strand during the making of Redes, 1934. # 1992 Ned Scott
Archive.
# The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved
doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcu028
Advance Access publication 19 March 2015
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 38.1 2015 11 35
Blake Stimson
theoretical and affective parameters in which Strands romantic socialism

might be given its due.4
New York Times critic Andy Grundbergs wholesale dismissal of Strands
mature work can stand for the first habit I have in mind: What happened to
Strand in the 30s happened to many other artists, Grundberg wrote in
1991, the romantic, revolutionary appeal of Russian Communism came to
represent esthetic progressivism, and thus their art began to devote itself to
the . . . common man.5 This is not to suggest that we or Grundberg are
exactly wrong in assuming that the innovative spirit of Strands photography
effectively ended when he redefined himself as a servant of socialism, but it
is to say that narratives of personal and cultural failure that uncouple politics
from innovation as modernitys ranking shibboleth and subterfuge miss more
than they get right.6
Our right-tilting penchant for reducing the common man and his
well-meaning servant to paper-thin cliches is first and foremost a product of
the Cold War, of course, as is our left-leaning, melancholy-inducing zeal for
revolt, but both call on much longer histories that take us back to the French
revolution and the traumatised responses that emerged in its wake. Grundbergs
repudiation of Strands political idealism, for example, draws its succour from
the conservative tradition that arose with Edmund Burkes disingenuous
admission I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty
as well as any gentleman and corresponding disavowal But I cannot
stand forward, and give praise or blame to . . . the nakedness and solitude of
metaphysical abstraction. Burke, like so many in our own time, would have us
turn to abstractions other in its stead: To be attached to the subdivision, to love
the little platoon we belong to in society rather than hoary metaphysical
abstractions like liberty, equality, and fraternity is the first principle (the germ
as it were) of public affections.7
The second habit that blocks our capacity to see the significance of Strands
aims our reduction of all revolutionary politics to the star of revolt and its
melancholy aftermath is equally born of the turn from metaphysics to
immediacy and offers its own left versions of Burkes subdivision or little
platoon. This dream made its most decisive Cold-War claim on our psychosocial
constitution with the famous calling of an old underclass to arms by Frantz Fanon
in his singularly influential 1961 Wretched of the Earth:
It is . . . in the lumpenproletariat that the insurrection will nd its urban spearhead. . . . the
pimps, the hooligans, the unemployed, and the petty criminals throw themselves into the
struggle like stout working men. . . . The prostitutes too, and the maids who are paid two
pounds a month, all who turn in circles between suicide and madness, will recover their
balance, once more go forward, and march proudly in the great procession of the
awakened nation.8
Just as our right-leaning inheritance from Burke remains fixated on awistful dream
of a pre-modern institutionalised freedom from abstraction of a state that has
been made to the people, and not the people conformed to the state9 so our
left-leaning, postmodern Fanonian bequest of an autonomous and spontaneous
lumpen-political formation remains gripped by romanticisms nostalgic
conjuring forth of a prerevolutionary world of peasant and slave rebellions in
lieu of the modern dream of revolution itself.10
We will return to the history of our lumpen romance below but for now we
might see its prehistory for our own period in the latter day romantic yearnings
of William Morris:
14 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 38.1 2015
4. This essay is intended only as an initial

theoretical outline for a more detailed study of
Strands mature work to follow.
5. Andy Grundberg, Photography View; A
Museum Looks at a Gift Horse, Not in the Mouth,
New York Times, 20 January 1991.
6. Something similar might be said for those more
finely tuned readings of Strands earlier work that
see suspicious harbingers of an attachment to a
common human telos other than the only
acceptable one technological development. See,
for example, the assessment of Jan-Christopher
Horak: Manhatta (1920), he writes, reaches for
modernisms project of deconstructing
renaissance perspective in favour of multiple,
reflexive points of view but is mitigated by
aesthetic concerns and philosophical premises that
are archaic and antimodernist.. . . With the
exception of portions of Native Land (1942) all of his
political filmmaking and later photography
concerns itself with preindustrial,
nature-connected forms of civilisation, rigorously
excluding any signs of industrialisation,
commercialisation, and modernity.
Jan-Christopher Horak, Modernist Perspectives
and Romantic Desire, Afterimage, vol. 15, no. 4,
November 1987, pp. 8, 15.
7. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in
France, ed. by Frank M. Turner (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2003).
8. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
(New York: Grove Press, 1963), pp. 81, 130.
9. Edmund Burke, On the Genius and Character
of the French Revolution as It Regards other
Nations, in The Works of Edmund Burke, vol. IV
(Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown,
1839), p. 444.
10. A world, in other words, that is prior to the
transition charted by Eugene D. Genovese:
The conquest of state power by the
representatives of the consolidating
bourgeoisie in France decisively
transformed the ideological and economic
terrain. Nothing changed overnight, but the
French Revolution provided the conditions
in which a massive revolt in Saint-Domingue
could become a revolution in its own right.
The brilliance with which Toussaint
LOuverture claimed for his enslaved
brothers and sisters the rights of liberty and
equality of universal human dignity
that the French were claiming for
themselves constituted a turning point in
the history of slave revolts and, indeed, of
the human spirit. Far from passively
accepting the hegemony of the ruling class,
Toussaint seized and appropriated that
hegemony at a transitional moment.
Photography and God
Henceforth, slaves increasingly aimed not

at secession from the dominant society but
at joining it on equal terms. [From Rebellion
to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts
in the Making of the Modern World (Baton
Rouge: LSU Press, 1979), pp. xix xx.].
11. E.P. Thompson, William Morris: From Romantic

to Revolutionary (New York: Pantheon, 1976),
p. 805.
12. Morris, The Society of the Future, quoted in
Thompson, p. 718; Michel Foucault, Friendship as
a Way of Life, in Paul Rabinow (ed), The Essential
Works of Foucault 1954 1984, Volume One - Ethics:
Subjectivity and Truth (New York: The New Press,
1997), p. 136.
13. E.P. Thompson cites Morris on the distinction
between the two views this way:
In Socialism: its Growth and Outcome
Morris and Bax referred to the difference
between the impersonal state and the
simple and limited kinship group: The
difference between these opposing
circumstances of society is, in fact, that
between an organism and a mechanism.
The earlier condition in which everything,
art, science ... law, industry, were personal,
and aspects of a living body, is opposed to
the civilized condition in which all these
elements have become mechanical, uniting
to build up mechanical life, and themselves
the product of machines material and
moral. (Thompson, 676 7).
This is how Homi Bhabha characterises that

forfeiture in Fanon:
The insurgent energies of the Algerian
peasantry and lumpenproletariat, Fanon
believed, would guard against the
corruption and cooptation of westernized
nationalist parties led by urban elites. But in
the opinion of some of his FLN comrades,
Fanon displayed a naive nostalgie de la
boue in championing a peasantry that had
become fragmented and displaced through
the 1950s. . . Fanons commitment to the
Algerian cause seemed to tum from a
political commitment into a more inward
identication, a consummate
self-fashioning of himself as an Algerian.
This radical indigenization of identity, like
his overestimation of the peasantry, could
be seen as his avoidance or enhancement
of his own natal and psychic reality a
compensatory family romance that would
disavow his Martinican origins, through a
phantasmatic denial of the unheroic
assimilation of the Antillean heritage in
favor of the virile and decolonised
fraternity of the FLN. [Foreword: Framing
Fanon in Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of
the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004),
p. xxxii.]
14. Karl Marx, Preface, Capital Volume III: The

Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole, http://
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/
1894-c3/pref.htm.
And how often it consoles me to think of barbarism once more ooding the world, and real
feelings and passions, however rudimentary, taking the place of our wretched hypocrisies.
With this thought in my mind all the history of the past is lighted up and lives again to me.
I used really to despair once because I thought what the idiots of our day call progress
would go on perfecting itself.11
Born of a love/hate relationship, the contradictory modern dream of revolt

that of creative destruction or a social form that casts off the fetters of social
form is doomed to return again and again in full romantic regalia to the
liberal legerdemain of a free market as society ever-lost object, and to the
little platoon of community as the markets forever-unrealised mythical
counter-ideal to the state. As Morris had yearned in 1888 I must tell you
that my special leading motive as a Socialist is hatred of civilization; my ideal of
the new Society would not be satisfied unless that Society destroyed
civilization and as Fanon longed for with his awakened nation of the
economically and politically dispossessed, so Michel Foucault would pine near
the end of his life, What is it to be naked among men, outside of
institutional relations, family, profession, and obligatory camaraderie?12 Losing
ourselves in the vitalists dream of rebellion against institutional relations just as
we do in Burkes opposing dream of an organic, self-authorizing status quo we
abandon the great modern claim for the mechanical political form of the social
contract as the minimum necessary condition of enfranchisement and forfeit the
world-changing modern distinction between revolt and revolution.13 Worse still,
like the literary adventurer who in his heart sneezes at political economywe forfeit
the even greater claims made in the name of a materialist understanding of power.14
Such has always been our postmodernism.
Strands version of romanticism, by contrast, falls into that class of
tendencies that Lowy and Sayre characterise as non-Romantic or even
anti-Romantic (not merely in the way they view Romanticism but also in
their own intellectual structures) that is, it was never a Morris-like
romantic anticapitalism or essentially a reaction against the way of life in
capitalist societies. Nor did it ever fall into romanticisms opposite, what
Lowy and Sayre call modernizing anticapitalism or an approach that
criticizes the present in the name of certain modern values utilitarian
rationalism, efficiency, scientific and technological progress.15 Instead,
Strands romance with socialism was a romance with Hegels actual God,
with the Idea of the state in its own right.
So, whether we dismiss Strand for his mawkish, mid-century social-realist
conformism or for his nave lack of any micropolitical outside to the likes of
obligatory camaraderie, we remain caught in the liberal contradiction
between aesthetics and politics that draws us back from the modernist promise
of that actual God to the false god of our prevailing (commodity) fetishism. We
might take Steve Edwardss caution about the limits of the utopianism he
champions in Morris to stand for what that contradiction can do to our desire
for a better life:
In important ways, News from Nowhere is more concerned with the look of the socialist
society than with its social arrangements: with stone walls and stone buildings; with pretty
mills dotted along the Thames; with how workers look in the elds and so on. At its worst it
is too cute for words.16
Seeing the world as image as cute or tedious, sublime or alien, aesthetic,

antiaesthetic or anaesthetic we routinely fall in with liberalisms directive to
lose ourselves in the endgame of private judgment, in the immediacy of bodily
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 38.1 2015 15
Blake Stimson
experience and its philistine corroboration by our immediately available and

equally alienated community of peers, and withdraw from the great modern
gambit of public life.17
We will never really know where we stand on the facile penchants and
repudiations that arise from such contradictions unless we put them to our most
strenuous test. Indeed, insofar as these default critical habits of mind and heart
can be taken as a litmus test, we may not know where we stand about political
or aesthetic commitment generally and thus, regardless of our politics, risk
becoming ensnared in the deadly dithering of liberal cynicism and ambivalence,
left-liberal roundabouts of zeal and melancholy, or the ersatz autonomy called
forth by anarchist and libertarian voluntarism.18 It is a central assumption of
this essay that none of us are immune from these traps and lures of market
life.19
The spirit of constitutions
Instead of the borderline respectability (and borderline uselessness) of the term

socialist, thus, we might raise the bar by simply agreeing with the chorus of
lovers, friends, comrades, associates, maligners, and nemeses that described
Strand from 1933 on as one manner or another of intransigent Stalinist.
Seared by the Stalinist desert wind is how one rank-and-file neoconservative
put it, Strand dried up and became an example of the destruction which
communism wreaked on many intellectuals of the period.20 Dried up or not,
an ideologue or not, intransigent or not, Strand never gave up his
commitment. Even during his last years in the 1970s his third wife Hazel
reported that he still thought things were going to get better in the socialist
field (albeit before adding her own melancholic editorial comment, one no
doubt tinged with complex feelings about her dead spouse, and it never did)
(Fig. 2).21
What that commitment meant during Strands lifetime was a complicated affair,
of course, but, in short, we might say simply that he was a true believer in the
promise of actually existing communism. Strands Stalinism, in other words,
was not about the authoritarianism or bureaucratisation or rule by cult of
personality that we have long thought of first and foremost, nor did it ever
stand for the identitarian idiocy of Proletkult and its ilk or the bureaucratised
aesthetico-political absolutism of socialist realism as state policy. Instead,
Strands Stalinism stood for something that was much more distant, abstract,
and general but still grounded in the world of Realpolitik: a social corporatist
statism or unwavering belief in the yet-unrealised promise of the corporeal
body of the state form as the living, breathing production of labour realising its
own as a political force.
In short, Strand was a practitioner of a leftist version of that form of political
modernism that one prominent anarchist has rejected with the epithet seeing
like a state.22 There were many other period variants of such seeing on the
left, of course, but Strands was distinct: it had little of the vanguardism
associated with Lenin, little of the culturalism associated with Trotsky or his
readers and collaborators at Partisan Review, little even of the war-of-position
oppositionalism associated with Gramsci or the repressed romanticism of
Lukacs, and little particularly of the spontaneism of either Rosa Luxembourg
or the anarchism that so captured the imagination of his contemporaries
during the moment of his aesthetic, intellectual, and political formation in
the 1910s.
15. Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism

Against the Tide of Modernity (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2002), pp. 16 8, 28.
16. Steve Edwards, The Colonisation of Utopia,
The First Condition (October 2006), http://www.
thefirstcondition.com/issue_05/issue05_
frameset_utopia.html.
17. Indeed, the error that Thompson made in his
attempt to reclaim Morriss aim to educate the
desires of the masses for a Marxism that his legacy
would transform was to fall back on an account of
desire that remained liberal, individual, and
private. Morriss general theory of desire was
inseparable from his own intense desire for
complete equality of condition for all men and thus
was, as Thompson rightly observes, desire born of a
moral proposition. (William Morris, 802) Put
differently, it was the desire of the do-gooder and
the plan was to inculcate that same selflessness/
opprobrium into the masses through economic
rules, social mores and the decorative arts. Morriss
aim, born of the Romantic critique of
Utilitarianism, Thompson writes,
is the organic one: the natural growth of
life will be set free from the articial (or
mechanical) constraints of civilisation.
Fullled Communist society will not depend
upon a new race arising of
morally-admirable people but upon the
growth of a communal value-system made
habitual by the absence of private property.
(803)
As such, Thompson is correct when he writes that

Morris, as a Utopian and moralist, can never be
assimilated to Marxism, but incorrect when he
says that it is because one may not assimilate desire
to knowledge. (807) Marxism has always had an
ample account of desire but it was never that of a
moral commandment ensconced and enmeshed in
an economic system. Instead, Marxist desire is the
desire of species being, of the proletariat or the
masses or humanity as a whole rising up as a kind of
Ubermensch in which each individual becomes
bigger, more powerful, more autonomous than
herself. In this sense it is only different from
the fascist or democratic desire for popular
sovereignty by virtue of its relative universality and
materiality qualities that, in the end, make it both
more moral and more powerful: Communism is
for us not a state of affairs which is to be established,
an ideal towhich reality will have to adjust itself. We
call communism the real movement which
abolishes the present state of things. [Karl Marx
(with Friedrich Engels), The German Ideology
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998), p. 57].
18. There are many measures for this test, of
course most famously, perhaps, being Walter
Benjamins negative benchmark that judges leftism
for which there is no longer in general any
corresponding political action, which is to the left
not of this or that political tendency but simply to
Photography and God
the left of what is in general possible, whose real

aim is to enjoy itself in a negativistic quiet, and
whose function is to give rise politically speaking
not to parties but to cliques, literarily speaking not
to schools but to fashions, economically speaking
not to producers but to agents. (Walter Benjamin,
Left-Wing Melancholy, in The Weimar Republic
Sourcebook, eds. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and
Edward Dimendberg [Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995], p. 305).
19. Fredric Jamesons account of one such lure
anarchisms seduction by the righteous critique of
domination is worth noting:
I here follow Althussers position, which
grasps the structure of the mode of
production as one fundamentally organized
by the relations of production, or in other
words by the structure of exploitation:
domination is therefore not only the
secondary result of this structure but also
the mode of its reproduction rather than of
its production.
The antithetical position is occupied, not by
any of the varieties of Marxism as such, but
rather by the latters relative and rst
cousin, anarchism; both are people of the
book, acknowledging Capital as their
fundamental text; but anarchism places
primary emphasis on domination, that is to
say, on versions and forms of power as such
(rather than what we could for shorthand
call economics), and everyone knows the
seduction exerted by this many-faceted
word today, in politics and theory alike. I
believe that the Marxist position evaluates
this emphasis as an essentially moral or
ethical one, which leads to punctual revolts
and acts of resistance rather than to the
transformation of the mode of production
as such; . . . the outcome of an emphasis on
exploitation is a socialist program, while
that of an emphasis on domination is a
democratic one, a program and a language
only too easily and often coopted by the
capitalist state. [Fredric Jameson,
Representing Capital: A Reading of
Volume One (London: Verso, 2011), p. 150.]
20. Arnold Beichman writing in the Washington

Times (July 21, 1999), available here: http://www.
beichman.com/Articles/STRAND.htm.
21. Paul Strand: Under the Dark Cloth, directed by
John Walker (1989; New York: Kino Video, 2002),
DVD.
22. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain
Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
Fig. 2. Viktor Nikolaevich Deni, The Smoke of chimneys is the breath of Soviet Russia, 1917 21, Collection
of Russian and Ukrainian posters, 1917 1921, Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library,
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
Instead, Strands version of seeing like a state was closest to the spirit that
Hegel had already conjured in 1795 and that would subsequently come to
serve as actually existing communisms justifying principle (even if Hegel had
characteristically arrogated too much of that spirit to the philosophers of his day
and not enough to the peoples [who] will learn to feel it, a mistake that Stalin
and his bureaucrats would reproduce and extend to tragic effect): why have we
been so late in recognizing mans capacity for freedom, placing him in the same
rank with all spirits?, he asks,
The philosophers are [nally] proving the dignity of man. The peoples will learn to feel it.
Not only will they demand their rights, which have been trampled in the dust, they will take
them back themselves, they will appropriate them. . . . With the spread of ideas as to how
things ought to be, the indolence that marks people set in their ways, who always take
everything the way it is, will disappear. This enlivening power of ideas even when they are
Blake Stimson
in themselves still limited such as the idea of the fatherland, of its constitution, and
so forth will lift hearts. . . . For the spirit of constitutions has presently made a pact with
23
self-interest and has founded its realm upon it.
Such a spirit of constitutions was there in Strands work in spades but with next to
nothing of the arrogation of philosopher proofs, vanguardists morality, or
bureaucrats paperwork. In projects like Native Land (1942), France in Profile
(1952), Living Egypt (1969), and Ghana: An African Portrait (1976), in other
words, he was ever trying to re-articulate the pact with self-interest that is born
with enfranchisement and shore up the realm founded upon it.24 What does
such a spirit look like?, he asked again and again. What nature is called on
when we experience ourselves as citizens or comrades? What is the human
material . . . revolution is working with? is how he would put it in his book on
Nassers Living Egypt.25 What is it to experience ones political faculty and
entitlement as a common man?
The directive he was given (or helped to develop himself) while working
for Mexicos Secretara de Educacion Publica as Director of its Oficina de
Fotografa y Cinematografa in 1933 was to demonstrate in an objective
manner the possibility of a social regimen whose justice is rooted in all men
working and all equally obtaining the satisfaction of their needs.26 This was a
mission that Strand took to heart and it would define the rest of his lifes work.
It confirmed what had already been there implicitly in his work in the heady
early days of World War I and the first round of socialist revolutions; it was
explicitly there even through the soul-crushing crises of 1939 and 1956; and, it
was there still during the equally heady and equally soul-crushing endgame of
state socialism and the rise of our own neoliberal age after 1968.
That leftist statism of this constitutional sort or leftist economic and political
institutionalism of any kind is largely unavailable to us now in our epoch of
renewed anarchism, libertarianism, and liberalism, on the one hand, and renewed
tribalism, communitarianism, and confessionalism, on the other hand, should not
blind us to the historical role it played in Strands day. Equally so, understanding
Strand as a true believer in actually existing socialism in the living corporatist
sense originally imagined for the first phase of communism the sense that
allows us to distinguish it from calcified, bureaucratised state socialism, on the one
hand, and emulsified, liberal democratic market socialism, on the other hand
should not be obscured by the other ways we continue to live with Stalins legacy.
The common sense that we will need to see beyond if we are to see Strand
accurately, in other words, is that which was pointedly summarised by Giorgio
Agamben in 1995: the theory of the State (and in particular of the state of
exception, which is to say, of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the transitional
phase leading to the stateless society) is the reef on which the revolutions of our
century have been shipwrecked.27 We will only fully understand Strands work if
we see the reef he saw rather than Agambens: that of the dictatorship of the
bourgeoisie and its Ur-principle of creative destruction the foundation for our
own latter-day theory of revolt that has led progressively towards mass
disenfranchisement from the sovereignty and protections that are the hallmark
principles of the democratic or socialist or communist state.28 Needless to say,
the consequences of that disenfranchisement massive redistributions of wealth,
opportunity, and power from those who work to those who are wealthy was
particularly acute in the early years of Strands career just as it has come to be
once again for us now.
As with our socialist-to-Stalinist escalation so too we might put pressure on the
neither-here-nor-there mealiness we often attribute to the tag romantic. On one
23. Georg W. F. Hegel, Hegel: The Letters, trans.

Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 356.
24. Marx would describe that pact with
self-interest as so: The very concept member of the
state implies that they are a part of the state, that the
state regards them as a part of itself. However, if
they are a part of the state, it is obvious that their
very social existence already constitutes their real
participation in it. Not only do they share in the
state, but the state is their share. To be a conscious
part of a thing means to take part of it and to take
part in it consciously. Without this consciousness
the member of the state would be an animal. Karl
Marx: Early Writings, ed. and trans. T.B. Bottomore
(London: C.A. Watts & Co. Ltd., 1963), p. 187.
25. Paul Strand and James Aldridge, Living Egypt
(New York: Horizon Press, 1969), p. 5.
26. Plan para la filmacion de peliculas educativas
quoted in James Krippner, Paul Strand in Mexico
(Aperture/Fundacion Televisa, 2010), p. 76.
Krippner notes that the authorship of this
document is difficult to determine.
27. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power
and Bare Life, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 12.
28. Recall that the policy recommendations for a
state run according to the interests of the masses (or
the dictatorship of the proletariat) given by The
Communist Manifesto would not, in fact, qualify as a
state of exception at all but instead would be a
function of state law acting on behalf of the public
interest at the behest of the majority. The
proletariat was to use its political supremacy or
will of the working majority to make changes, not
fall back on a state of exception that takes its power
outside of (even as it affirms) the juridical order:
These measures will, of course, be different
in different countries.
Nevertheless, in most advanced countries,
the following changes, made by degree, will
be generally applicable:
1. Abolition of property in land and
application of all rents of land to public
purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated
income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Conscation of the property of all
emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the banks of
the state, by means of a national bank
with state capital and an exclusive
monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of
communication and transport in the
hands of the state.
7. Extension of factories and instruments
of production owned by the state; the
bringing into cultivation of waste-lands,
Photography and God
and the improvement of the soil

generally in accordance with a common
plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work.
Establishment of industrial armies,
especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with
manufacturing industries; gradual
abolition of all the distinction between
town and country by a more equable
distribution of the populace over the
country.
10. Free education for all children in public
schools. Abolition of childrens factory
labour in its present form. Combination
of education with industrial production,
etc., etc.
When, in the course of development, class
distinctions have disappeared, and all
production has been concentrated in the
hands of a vast association of the whole
nation, the public power will lose its political
character.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist

Manifesto (London: Pluto Press, 2008), pp. 63 5.
29. Karl Marx: Early Writings, p. 156.
30. See, for example, Fraser MacDonald, Paul
Strand and the Atlanticist Cold War, History of
Photography, vol. 28, no. 4, Winter 2004, p. 362.
31. Catherine Duncan, Paul Strand: The World on My
Doorstep (New York: Aperture, 1997), p. 1.
32. Strand: Under the Dark Cloth, 1989.
33. Rebecca Salisbury James, unpublished
manuscript, Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia OKeeffe
Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale
University, n.d. Quoted in Nancy Kuhl, That
Strangest of American Places, in Intimate Circles:
American Women in the Arts (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2003), p. 9.
34. Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Gregor
Benton and Rodney Livingstone (London: Penguin,
1974), p. 352.
level, of course, both terms are good enough: Just as socialist correctly leans on
social being as the foremost dimension of any progressive politics, so too
romantic rightfully calls forth registers of love, desire, and the capacity for
giving oneself over to a larger relationship or cause as its necessary
engines-of-being. After all, what else is intended by an earnest greeting like
comrade, or citizen, brother, or sister than such a heartfelt expression of
collective love? To bring about a better world, the term romantic socialist
tells us if we choose to hear it, you have to believe you will be a more fully
realised human being for that love, that it will embody a return of man to his
human, i.e. social, life, as Marx put it, and that your love object in this
case the state will become more fully human too.29 You have to want to
procreate a better world, to create a new society through your bonds with
others, and believe that such love is the telos or purpose of life.
The many that have diagnosed Strand with a profound emotional attachment to
Communism and the like, suggesting that his political commitment was a
compensatory overinvestment for things missing in other areas of his life, are
undoubtedly right.30 That said, we might give greater weight to the diagnoses of
the photographer himself when he insisted again and again that his discoveries
should not be measured on Romanticisms scale within himself but instead by
the materialist gauge of their manifest existence in the world around him.31 If
we allow this point, then Strands emotional attachment to communism will
seem absolutely appropriate and fully lived. Such an attachment, in other words,
would have little of the new-world, late-capitalist pestilence of narcissism; instead
the form of its pathology would be in the eighteenth-century mould of
self-negation equivalent to him courting one of his soon-to-be wives by saying, in
the customary paean of the lover, I love you because your beauty overwhelms
me, because it exceeds my comprehension, because it is a greater power than
me, because I lose myself in you. The evidence suggests that it was not Strands
way to say this sort of thing to his wives but he effectively did so to the promise
of communism that he found in the world around him.
He put his experience of that love this way, Well, actually, I dont choose the
things that I photograph, they choose me.32 Strands first wife Rebecca saw it too
and was a bit more effusive:
Objects becoming essences of themselves, related to each other, becoming unities.
Photographs. Not like the others, not mere records, not things just looked at, but SEEN . . . .
No evasion, no tricks, plenty of sharpness. The real SHOW, the real SHOW, the real
SHOW.33
In other words, Strand and those who saw what he saw were reaching for that
relationship to the world that Marx understood to underpin and result from the
supersession of private property:
The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object,
made by man for man. The senses have therefore become theoreticians in their
immediate praxis. They relate to the thing for its own sake, but the thing itself is an
objective human relation to itself and to man, and vice-versa. Need or enjoyment have
therefore lost their egoistic nature, and nature has lost its mere utility in the sense that its
use has become human use.34
The promise of communism existed in theworld for Strand as it had for Marx in the
same way that use value is separable from exchange value such that it can be called
into service as social value rather than property value. Social value is only as
available as the political-economic conditions that enable it, of course, but it
Blake Stimson
would be foolish to not see innate human desire for that form of value in the
same sense as our innate desires for food or shelter or sex as the material
basis for left critical thought and aesthetic response. Strands aim was to give
body to such a human eye in order to see that potential in the world around
him giving form to objects becoming essences of themselves, related to each
other, becoming unities or the real SHOW. Put differently, it was a way of
reaching for a new relation to the person, to woman, to things, as Aleksander
Rodchenko had it in 1925, for a future in which people and things are no longer
instrumentalised through market relations but instead are enfranchised as
equals, comrades, and not these black and mournful slaves, even if it was a
very different way from Rodchenkos own.35
In the end, the problem with the modifier romantic as we use it now is that it
softens or makes overly emotional the sober, methodical, and mechanical
character of Strands political commitment, on the one hand, and displaces the
passion of his romantic investment, on the other hand. It suggests that his desire
was misdirected and self-indulgent, that it was drawn away from its object to
flights of melancholy and fancies of revolt, on the one hand, and to nostalgic
returns to little platoons and their place-based sense of belonging, on the other.
The Strand criticism is full of such dismissals: his loyalty to the fullness of the
world as it is, as one critic judged it, is loyalty to the timeless and the universal
rather than the putatively higher bar of the immediate, the contingent, the
unsettled.36 As well-meaning as they may be, such critiques are simply wrong:
Strands loyalty was never reducible to a complacent acceptance of the world as
it is in either of its standard bourgeois forms the romantics timelessness or
the vitalists contingency but instead was always tied to a sense of project, to
nature realising itself in the constructions of human recognition. In other
words, he was as much concerned with nature as his bourgeois peers but his
task was never to simply bear witness to either its stasis or flux. Instead he
sought to realise naturally given potential through the artifice of form in the
same way we always have or always have had the potential to by cognitive
and aesthetic means.
To put the romantic side of our label to the test, thus, I propose that we up its
ante by shifting focus to that register of desire that falls on the other side of the self/
world divide, the side that Strand said chose him. My hypothesis, in short, is not
only that Strand was a kind of Stalinist as fraught with peril as such a committed
form of statism still is for us today even worse, he was something like a theophanic
Stalinist or a Stalinist to whom communism was revealed as if by the hand of God.
Just to reiterate what should already be clear, I do not mean my awkward label
theophanic Stalinist or the even more unwieldy position it describes to be simply
more extreme than the diagnoses of Strands critics, to be something like a
psychotic break with the neurotic contradiction-in-terms that romantic socialist
is typically taken to be. Nor do I mean to suggest that Strand was an apostle of
diamat, histomat, or five-year plans, much less forced collectivisation, purges,
gulags, scorched earth, and the rest, as if such a hell on earth were a revealed
truth or godly decree. Nor, finally, do I mean to suggest that he was secretly
doubly doctrinaire or burdened with a catchall moralism, claiming for himself not
only the moderns science of history but also the premodern-cum-postmoderns
faith in God-cum-the-invisible-hand-of-the-market. Instead, I want to offer a
different kind of defence of both Stalinism and theophany in Strands work in
order to reconsider the promise of the state as this actual God for the particular
world we find ourselves in today.
35. Quoted in Christina Kiaer, Imagine No

Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian
Constructivism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008),
p. 1.
36. Alan Trachtenberg, Introduction, in Paul
Strand: Essays on his Life and Work, ed. Maren Stange
(New York: Aperture, 1990), pp. 2, 6.
Photography and God
Taken to himself with love a dead thing

37. Patrick McGilligan, Backstory 2: Interviews with
Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991), pp. 185 87.
38. Ben Maddow, AView from Below: Paul
Strands Monumental Presence, American Art,
vol. 5, no. 3 (Summer, 1991), p. 65.
39. Ben Maddow, Edward Weston: His Life
(New York: Aperture, 2005), p. 21.
40. Zinnemann later went on to a Hollywood
career that focused on the inner struggle of solitary
individuals in a hostile world with films such as High
Noon, From Here to Eternity, and A Man for all Seasons.
Let me try to allay the doubts you may well have about my intentions by
introducing two well-known documents pertaining to Strand from the Cold
War, one early and historic, the other late and of more anecdotal significance.
These and a little further testimony from his intimates should leave little doubt
about just what sort of period character Strand was and, perhaps, relieve some
of the suspicions you might have that I myself am adopting the role of romantic,
whether socialist or otherwise.
The first is the open letter by four hundred self-described leading Americans
addressed To All Active Supporters of Democracy and Peace and calling for
more cooperation with the Soviet Union released on 14 August 1939 some nine
days before the world-changing mutual non-aggression pact was agreed to by
the Hitler and Stalin regimes. Its signatories included Strand together with
many other well-known cultural producers from the period, among them
Waldo Frank, Hugo Gellert, William Gropper, Dashiell Hammett, Ernest
Hemingway, Granville Hicks, and Langston Hughes. I think it is safe to say that
this document speaks for itself as a historical marker, particularly when we bear
it in mind with all the horrors of Stalins rule that we have come to learn of
since then.
The second document is a 1991 expose from below by Ben Maddow,
screenwriter for Strands 1942 film Native Land and later HUAC informant on,
among others, the films co-director Leo Hurwitz (and, no doubt, Strand
himself).37 Maddows assessment refers to Strands work in the Hebrides,
Egypt, Morocco, and Ghana between 1954 and 64 but it can stand for the
main thrust of his lifes work beginning with his stay in Mexico from 1932 to 34:
Here, among the simple folk, he could photograph the heroes of his mind. Strand looked at
them as The People; actually, they were small shopkeepers, craftsmen, village peasants,
with all the prejudices of the small worlds they inhabited.38
Just to put this appraisal into a larger critical perspective that should make his
diagnosis crystal clear, Maddow could write of another photographer that he
favoured over Strand Edward Weston that, he spent the richness of his time
and intensity of his spirit on his multiple love-affairs; and he made hundreds of
photographs of the nude. In nearly every case, art and desire were inextricably
entwined.39 Something of the same critical perspective was put forward by Fred
Zinnemann, co-director of Strands film The Wave.40 Strands strength, according
to Zinnemann, was his colossal conviction, his doctrinaire Marxism, but that
strength was born of personal isolation from the real world of human interaction:
he didnt have much contact deeply with people although he felt very strongly
about mankind, Zinnemann said, he loved humanity in the abstract rather than
in the specific.41
This distinction is brought painfully home by all three of Strands wives. Number
two, Virginia Stevens, reported that Strand had great humanitarianism and
compassion and so on but he could not sit and touch you and caress you, you
see, he could not do that. I entered the dark wood when I married him. . . . as a
human being wanting something close, no he was not there.42 Hazel would
seem to have had more patience for such indifference, and judging from the
many photographs of Strand being attentive to her, it would seem he also
learned a lesson or two in older age about interpersonal love. Even so Hazel
reported that she would find him caressing his photographs like youd pet a cat
or a child, she said, and made the diagnosis, surely with no little remorse, that
Blake Stimson
it was his photographs, not her, that were his woman, his children, his everything,
the love of his life.43
Perhaps most painful, if one reads between the lines, is the reaching testimony
coming from Rebecca, and that from their shared intimate Stieglitz. You can hear
it in the disembodied terms of Rebeccas love, the way in which Strands
photographs themselves played the role of proxy or relay in the young couples
relationship bringing them together, on the one hand, but keeping them apart, on
the other: The affirmation of what I believed him to be the first time I saw his
photographs what I still believe him to be that has been my greatest
happiness, she wrote to Stieglitz in 1928 at a point when her relationship with
Strand had begun to deteriorate significantly.44 Stieglitz would respond to
Rebecca in kind a year after the divorce writing, I dont forget the many years of
Pauls loyalty, not only to me personally but to something beyond all of us to
the Idea and the Idea is as alive as ever. That I know.45 Indeed, the
heart-breaking pictures that Strand took of Rebecca during their last years
together invite us to imagine just what an Idea feels like when one lives within
its constraints for too long just as the delightful photographs that Stieglitz took of
Rebecca several years earlier invite us to remember what life can feel like when
ideas are subordinated to people, when the excesses of mind are kept in check by
the everyday immediacy of embodied life, when life is lived in the specific rather
than the abstract (Figs 3 and 4).
So Strand was an idealist, or an ideologue, or a moralist, or a dogmatist, or a
monk, and he was so to such an extent that it made him seem, at least in
intimate contexts, as though he were something other than human. He lacked
passion Stieglitz said. Strands good friend Harold Clurman put the difference
to him frankly in 1934: where Strands approach was sharper, harder, less
tolerant, a little aggravated, resentful and cold, Stieglitzs was always intimate
with everything, always connected as with a woman.46 Put differently, we
might say that Strands love of humanity in the abstract rather than in the
specific was not so far removed from the cold, rational machine or new god
that art in its occupation of the photographic apparatus was to take on as its evil
twin. The photographer has taken to himself with love a dead thing was how
Strand himself put it in a bit of particularly symptomatic phrasing.47 As his
critics have rightfully enough assumed, Strands cosmic world view trucked
with a kind of visual dehumanisation, with a techno-seraphic standpoint that
cast human beings as antlike creatures within a larger economy of meaning.48
You will recall that the first impulse of Strands formative essay Photography
and the New God was understandably enough to be a Luddite screed. We
could think of any of his well-known turns-of-phrase the one about being
ground to pieces under the heel of the new God, would do but I will have
Marx provide the main work of summary instead to broaden the foundation of
Strands later position. In our days, Marx could say in 1856, just as Strand
might well have in 1922, just as we ourselves can so readily say today,
everything seems pregnant with its contrary: Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of
shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it; The
newfangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of
want; The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character.49
The second impulse of Strands position, like Marxs, was to bring that contradiction
to term by serving as midwife for the birth of a new age. Humanity would triumph
not by breaking the machines Luddite-style but instead by refashioning them to

44. Rebecca Strand to Stieglitz, New York City, 13
May 11928. Quoted in Belinda Rathbone, Portrait
of a Marriage: Paul Strands Photographs of
Rebecca, The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal, vol. 17,
1989 p. 98.
45. Stieglitz to Rebecca Strand, New York City,
December 22, 1933. Quoted in Rathbone,
Portrait, p. 98.
46. Naomi Rosenblum, Women of Santa Anna,
Mexico, 1933 in Paul Strand: Essays, p. 48 and Steve
Yates, Mr. Bennett, Vermont, 1944 in Paul Strand:
Essays, p. 89.
47. Paul Strand, Photography and the New God,
Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts, vol. 3,
no. 4, November 1922, p. 253.
48. Horak, Modernist Perspectives and Romantic
Desire, pp. 14 15.
49. Karl Marx, Speech at Anniversary of the
Peoples Paper, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels:
Selected Works in Three Volumes, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1969), http://www.marxists.org/
archive/marx/works/1856/04/14.htm/. Or, as
he put it a few years later, The Most developed
machinery. . . forces the worker to work longer
than the savage does, or than he himself did with the
simplest, crudest tools. Karl Marx, Grundrisse:
Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough
Draft), trans Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin
Books, 1973), pp. 708 9.
Photography and God
Fig. 3. Paul Strand, Rebecca, Taos, New Mexico, 1930. # Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive.
Blake Stimson
Fig. 4. Alfred Stieglitz, Rebecca Salsbury Strand, 1922, Gelatin silver print, 11.5 8.9 cm (image/paper);
33.4 26.7 cm (mount), Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949.694, Art Institute of Chicago. # 2015 Georgia
OKeeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
non-contradictory human ends, by working through the machinic victories of art

towards redemption of their accompanying loss of character.
On the broadest level, such an approach was not uncommon. The highest
historic aim taken up by modern art and communism alike was to inhabit that
loss of character, to take to oneself with love a dead thing, to try to redeem it
from the inside. This meant owning up to being a cog in the machine, accepting
that the affective and apperceptive conditions of modern life disaggregate the
experience of social being from an organic whole into a mechanical experience
of its parts from the gemeinschaftlich comforts of the little platoon to the
gesellschaftlich abstraction of the Leviathan not in order to somehow step
outside of alienation back into a religious or pseudo-religious holism as
romantics like William Morris would have it but instead to artificially refashion
an even more synthetic social being and character from its lonely and
disaggregated parts.
Photography and God
The biological leap

50. Strand, Photography and the New God,
p. 258.
51. Marx, Early Writings, p. 226.
52. Paul Strand, Realism: A Personal View, Sight
and Sound 19 (1950), p. 23.
Chief among the small-world prejudices that Maddow and others attributed to
Strand in order to miscast his romanticism was religion and implicit in their
critique of his later work was that it was grounded in religious values (Fig. 5).
Strand, of course, had been as critical of the Old God as he was of the New but
it would be misguided to assume that he threw out the concept of God
altogether. The closing lines of the 1922 essay make this explicit:
53. Trachtenberg, in Paul Strand: Essays, p. 11.

54. To see that bridging principle one would need
to agree with Hegel that it is clear that Spirit has
now got beyond the substantial life it formerly led in
the element of thought, that it is beyond the
immediacy of faith and that The beautiful, the
holy, the eternal, religion, and love are the
bait required to arouse the desire to bite. [G.W.F.
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1976), p. 4.] Put differently, that
desire is itself the dialectic or the public sphere or
what Terry Eagleton calls the performative:
The performative and the propositional
work into each other. But it is a typically
positivist kind of mistake to begin with the
propositional, just as it would be for
someone trying to analyze a literary text,
which is basically a performance.
Somebody who didnt grasp that would be
making a root-and-branch mistake about
the kind of thing being confronted. These
new atheists, and, indeed, the great
majority of believers, have been conned
rather falsely into a positivist or dogmatic
theology, into believing that religion consists
in signing on for a set of propositions.
(Nathan Schneider, Religion for radicals: An
interview with Terry Eagleton, The
Immanent Frame: Secularism, religion and
the public sphere, http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/
2009/09/17/religion-for-radicals-aninterview-with-terry-eagleton/.)
Rejecting all Trinities and all Gods [the photographer] puts to his fellow-workers this
question squarely: What is the relation between science and expression? Are they not both
vital manifestations of energy, whose reciprocal hostility turns the one into the destructive
tool of materialism, the other into anemic phantasy, whose coming together might
integrate a new religious impulse? Must not these two forms of energy converge before a
living future can be born of both?50
While the singular forward movement of the vitalist concept of energy is a period
version of bourgeois complacency, a go with the flow manner of accepting the
world as it is, Strand did not allow it to rest as a force unto itself but instead
splits it into a dialectical pairing. This turned his argument away from period
Bergsonian holism, from a homogenous present structured by the capitalist
leitmotifs of dissolution, flow, and equivalence, from man in his uncultivated,
unsocial aspect, man in his contingent existence, man just as he is, man as he
has been corrupted, lost to himself, sold, and exposed to the rule of inhuman
conditions and elements by the entire organisation of our society in a word,
man who is not yet a true species-being, and towards structural notions of
reciprocity and convergence used to construct a living future.51 Put differently,
this was his spirit of constitutions.
He would make this same argument a quarter-century later more forcefully
when he called for rejecting both venal realism (or the description, no
matter how honest, of the exceptional or sensational in life) and mere
slice-of-life naturalism which is completely static in its unwillingness to be
involved in the struggle of man towards a better and a fuller life.52 That
struggle was for meaningful abstraction, for a way to organise and realise the
communication necessary to create a better, fuller life, for something very
much like an effectively democratic or socialist or communist state form.
The real challenge Strands conclusion puts to us, we might say, is whether to
take his call to integrate a new religious impulseseriously, whether to assume that
some version of the Old God is being conjured in the name of immanent critique or
materialist dialectics or a governing impulse of our species being. Some may grind
their teeth at such prose, Alan Trachtenberg once noted about Strands call, and,
indeed, it may seem to reek of the worst sort of romantic socialism, one that is so
loosely defined that socialisms atheism actually rolls over into its opposite.53
Looked at in another register, however, Strands call may serve us by speaking
not only to his moment but also to the renewed religiosity that has taken on
sufficient political force in the last half century to deserve our attention.
Indeed, the force of that renewal has been significant enough that we may want
to consider whether all those people on the other side of modernitys
theological abyss may have something right, that the meeting point between
Old God and New, the bridging principle that Strand tried to wrest from the
abyss introduced by capitalisms secularising spirit in the name of a
counter-spirit of constitutions, a counter-spirit of the state, should rightfully
enough be labelled this actual God.54
Blake Stimson
Fig. 5. Paul Strand, Crucixion, Oaxaca, 1933. #Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive.
Photography and God
55. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters of

the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. by George Schwab
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), p. 36.
56. Marx, Early Writings, p. 222.
57. See Fredric Jamesons effort to make a similar
argument for the military in An American Utopia:
Fredric Jameson in Conversation with Stanley
Aronowitz, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=MNVKoX40ZAo. Marx put that
unfreedom this way: The emancipation of the state
from religion is not the emancipation of actual man
from religion. Religion is precisely. . . the devious
acknowledgement of man, through an
intermediary. Marx, Early Writings, pp. 226, 218.
58. Quoted by Basil Davidson in Working with
Strand, in Stange, Paul Strand, p. 211.
59. On the contrary we should conceive of
realism as dynamic, as truth which sees and
understands a changing world and in its turn is
capable of changing it, in the interest of peace,
human progress, and the eradication of human
misery and cruelty, and towards the unity of all
people. We must take sides. Paul Strand,
Realism, p. 26.
60. As, for example, imagined here: Steyerl
proposes to start from the objects end instead and
anticipate the collectivity of capitalist consumption
as one which can potentially engage in its own
activation. Kerstin Stakemeier, Plane
Destructive: the Recent Films of Hito Steyerl,
Mute, February 23, 2011, http://www.metamute.
org/editorial/articles/plane-destructive-recentfilms-hito-steyerl#.
Equally if not more disturbing to secularisms faithful, is to consider Strands

alternative religious impulse in light of Carl Schmitts well-known rule-ofthumb that all significant concepts of the modern state are secularised
theological concepts.55 Indeed, Marx had already noted long before Schmitt,
the perfected Christian state is not the so-called Christian state which
recognises Christianity as its foundation, as the state religion [but] rather the
atheist state, the democratic state, the state which relegates religion to the level
of the other elements of civil society.56 What Strand proposed was simply that
we take that secularised theological concept at work in the atheist state
seriously as such, that we take it on dialectically and not with the vacillations of
liberal cynicism and ambivalence, left enthusiasm and melancholy, or the self/
world polarity of anarchist and libertarian voluntarism.
In other words, the state or the city or the economy or technology or religion was
potential bearer of freedom equally as much as they were potential bearers of
unfreedom for Strand.57 This tendency reached a kind of apogee in 1942 in the
film Native Land with its story turning around the actions of a US Senate
committee and in his 1949 advice to filmmakers to love ones own country and
risk something for it.58 The only viable battleground, he insisted, was actually
existing social abstraction, actually existing state form, and any efforts to locate
freedom outside of such abstractions, outside of the state form, amounted to
pulling back and not taking sides.59
Let me try, via a rudimentary Marxian axiom, to come around to this idea that
looking at Strands work now might invite us to think beyond the sophomoricism
of simple or undialectical critique, to reimagine left political investment in the
old, hoary ideals of church and state even as we are fully aware of their limits. This
axiom will be familiar to most but it bears rehearsing nonetheless since it is easy
to lose sight of its implications in the froth of what is sometimes rightly enough
called the marketplace of ideas. The axiom has three parts and goes as follows.
First, if you want to change the world from below that is, change it without
vast sums of money, existing institutional might, raw political power, or
extraordinary personal charms you have to fall back on human sociality, on
our innate capacity to communicate, our capacity to hold ideals and principles
in common, our capacity to defer to and learn from the wisdom of each other,
our capacity to unite around a commonly articulated, commonly realised cause
and, most importantly, our capacity to work cooperatively.
Second, this innate capacity for organisation and shared understanding can
happen in all sorts of ways interpersonally, culturally, socially, or politically,
for example but if you really want traction, if you really want to scale up to
the level of world-changing significance, that organisation must be based in the
world of work. The reason for this prioritisation of working life regardless of
whether it is paid or not, in the workplace or the home, the work of production
or reproduction over other aspects is pretty simple: at least for the moment
the primary function of society has to be its own reproduction and expansion
at least enough to accommodate population growth and so work, by necessity and
definition, is where time and power lie. All non-work forms of organisation,
as valuable as they may be, are after hours, nights, weekends, and election
days, the stuff of clubs, enthusiasts, ideologues and aristocrats, holiday believers,
campaign-season citizens and spectacle-driven activists. Regardless of how
it imagines itself, each in its own way is grist for the ever-receding, ever-selfmarginalising fantasy of a politically significant consumer collectivism.60
Third, this means that the realistic political subject of world-changing from
below is first and foremost a labourer. Or better, that part of each of us that is a
realistic political subject is the labouring, productive part, the part that
Blake Stimson
reproduces and engenders social life. What constitutes labour may be a more
complicated question than it used to be but such complications do nothing to
make the necessity of the primary category subside or slip away. Happiness is
connected to work, is how Theodor Adorno once put it, because work is the
domain in which we transcend our animal nature and constitute humanity as a
whole through the production and reproduction of society. Indeed, he continued,
The fact that human beings have broken out of nature is very remarkable. Not until today,
under conditions of monopoly, has the world of animals been reinstated. . . . The biological
leap of the human species is being revoked.61
The biological leap (and its resultant happiness) was born of the sociability created
by interdependent labour just as it is that same interdependency that threatens to
take it away as it makes work generalised, formalised, abstract. The flipside of
interdependencys vision of the whole is specialisations isolation from that same
whole.62
So, economy, labour, organisation, and art, or more broadly, imagination
these are the available root terms if you want to change the world from below
because they are the foundations of our biological leap. Put differently, these are
the root terms of meaningful and lasting democratisation, socialisation, and
communisation and the only available course out of the devastation of liberal
cynicism and ambivalence, the roundabout of left zeal and melancholy, and the
endgame of anarchist and libertarian voluntarism.
There are conventional examples of artworks that have tried to contribute to this
project, of course we might call to mind George Groszs 1920 Toads of Property, for
example, or El Lissitskys 1942 All for the front! All for Victory! but in the end almost
all veer towards one or the other of two failed approaches: a top-down proletarianism
of avanguardist-Leninist-cum-bureaucratic-Stalinist sort that forces the organisational
question by substituting propositions for process, on the one hand, or, on the other
hand, the spinelessness and futility of stand-alone critique, of critique which does
not speak from its standpoint within the relations of production but instead from
consumptions mythical land of difference. The consequence of the first is
doctrinalism and of the second a moralism in which, as Marx once put it, the
interests of the two classes are simultaneously mutually blunted.63
Strand was trying to do something different. Ultimately, he was looking for a way
that our innate capacity for social being could make hay from our lived alienation and
disaggregation. For example, as he put in the press release for Manhatta, his goal was
to put pressure on the towering geometry of lower Manhattan until the spirit
manifest[s] itself .64 We might fairly enough ask what spirit exactly Strand wished
to wrest from the J.P. Morgan bank and the financial district generally that he
featured in Manhatta. Certainly it was neither Lissitsky-like vanguardism nor
Groszs outsiderism of mere critique. I think it is also safe to say that it was not
the same spirit that was called forth by the 1920 Wall Street bombing that
targeted the very same facade of the J.P. Morgan bank featured by Strand, the
anarchist spirit that rested on the premise, as Mikhail Bakunin had put it in 1871,
that Only Life, delivered from all its governmental and doctrinaire barriers, and
given full liberty of action, can create (Figs 7 and 8).65 Nor was his conviction
edging toward the position more familiar in our own day, as Mario Tronti would
say in 1965, that, the proletariat is nothing more than the immediate political
interest in the abolition of every aspect of the existing order [and] has no need of
institutions in order to bring to life what it is.66
This is just to say that there was nothing at all of this well-worn (and increasingly
contemporary) strain of liberalism, anarchism, and libertarianism in Strands
61. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer,

Towards a New Manifesto? NLR 65 (September
October 2010), p. 58.
62. In a related vein, Alain Badiou argued a few
years ago that this loss of the experience of labour as
a social enterprise has coincided with the joint
disappearances of Man and God:
Classical humanism without God, without
project, without the becoming of the
Absolute is a representation of man which
reduces him to his animal body. . . . [W]hat
contemporary democracies wish to impose
upon the planet is an animal humanism. In
it man only exists as worthy of pity. Man is a
pitiable animal. [Alain Badiou, The Century
(Polity Press: Cambridge, UK, 2007),
pp. 174 75 (italics in original).]
This is just to make Hegels foundational dialectical

point that The animal is a particular entity. . .
whose bounds cannot be exceeded [Hegel,
Philosophy of Right, 190, p. 228] and therefore does
not have access to the God-like universality that is
the horizon of humanity, a reversible condition that
Friedrich Kittler would highlight in this way:
Because language [or art] belongs to
everyone, according to Hegels insight,
descriptions always already transform
individuals into universals. . . . Modern
forensic evidence, on the other hand, works
with media rather than arts its correlate,
therefore, is nothing but statistically
singularised individuals . . . As you may
remember, nitrocellulose can be used to
make either bombs, like the anarchists, or
roll lm, like the Viennese police. Between
these two barrages, the anarchistic and the
photographic, the human as collective
individual explodes. [Friedrich Kittler,
Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, trans.
Anthony Enns (Cambridge, UK: Polity,
2010), pp. 142 43, 145].
63. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis

Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers,
1963), p. 54.
64. Paul Strand, unpublished press release, cited in
Jan-Christopher Horak, Paul Strand and Charles
Sheelers Manhatta, in Lovers of Cinema: The First
American Film Avant-Garde 1919 1945, (ed.),
J. Horak, (London: University of Wisconsin Press,
1995), p. 272.
65. Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin, God and the
State (New York: Cosimo, Inc., 2008), p. 62.
66. Mario Tronti, Strategies of Refusal, in
S. Lotringer and C. Marazzi (eds), Autonomia: PostPolitical Politics (New York: Semiotext(e), 1980),
p. 34.
Photography and God
67. As David Graeber described it in 2002, for

example, a broad-based, general consensus about
oppositional politics came into focus in the 1990s
culminating in the 1999 protests in Seattle that
organised itself around the shared goals of
exposing, delegitimizing and dismantling
mechanisms of rule while winning ever-larger
spaces of autonomy from it. In the context of such
an antipolitical, anti-rule, anti-statist politics,
counting how many people involved in the
movement actually call themselves anarchists,
and in what contexts, is a bit beside the point.
(David Graeber, The New Anarchists, New Left
Review 13 (Jan Feb 2002), pp. 68, 62.)
He offers this definition of contemporary smalla anarchism which can be taken to stand for the
operative understanding used here:
By anarchism here I am speaking less
about anarchism as a political identity,
about explicitly anarchist organizations,
individuals who refer to themselves as
anarchists of one variety or another
though these have, certainly, increased
dramatically in number in recent decades
so much as anarchism as a form of
practice, an ethical system that rejects the
seizure of state power, and, to the extent
possible, any appeal to or entanglement in
institutions of state power, and that relies
instead on classical anarchist principles of
self-organization, voluntary association,
direct action, and mutual aid. The centrality
of anarchism in this sense only really
became fully apparent to those on the
radical Left in North America in the early
days of the global justice movement from
19992001, but by now as increasingly
in other parts of the world as well it has
become impossible to deny.
Elsewhere, he provides this even broader

justification which can stand well-enough for the
political philosophy and theory of human nature
that the legacy of Strands career stands opposed to
for us today:
while people can be reasonable and
considerate when they are dealing with
equals, human nature is such that they
cannot be trusted to do so when given
power over others. Give someone such
power, they will almost invariably abuse it in
some way or another.
Do you believe that most politicians are
selsh, egotistical swine who dont really
care about the public interest? Do you think
we live in an economic system which is
stupid and unfair?
If you answered yes, then you subscribe to
the anarchist critique of todays society at
least, in its broadest outlines.
(David Graeber, Are You An Anarchist? The

Answer May Surprise You!, The Anarchist Library,
June 8, 2010, n.p.) Strand never collapsed critiques
of political corruption and economic exploitation in
this manner.
Fig. 6. Paul Strand, Bowler Hat, New York, 1916. #Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive.
work. It would be a mistake, however, to use such an evaluation as a litmus test of

his leftism, of his desire for significant social change resulting in a much more
democratic world.67 It would also be a mistake to use such a measure to assume
that his understanding of the people or the masses or society as a whole was
simply woolly, simply the sort of image we often have in mind when we use the
label romantic socialist.
Strand said later that he knew little about cartels in the 1910s and 20s but he
was never oblivious to the exercise of power. His view was intuitive and from a
distance, for sure, or, to put it differently, it was from that level of abstraction
that allows one to see and feel social form even if it offers little footing in the
hurly-burly of direct political action or immediate interpersonal relationships.
In this sense his way was symbolic or metaphorical or conventionally artistic in
its primary aims. But that does not mean that it was not also analytical, also
ever looking to make critical typological distinctions, ever looking to see how
symbolic form also functions as social system.
Such systemic thinking is evident enough in the place-centred films beginning
with Manhatta and reaching a kind of nadir in Native Land but we might also take the
pairing of two images from 1915 and 1916 to stand as an early example the
original still photograph of the Morgan bank and the man-on-the-street image
usually titled Bowler Hat (Figs 6 and 7). Like many in his day Strand was
keenly attuned to the disparities between rich and poor but even in these
Blake Stimson
Fig. 7. Paul Strand, Wall Street, New York, 1915. # Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive.
Fig. 8. Photograph taken at the Wall Street terrorist bombing, Sept. 16, 1920.
early photographs he was already pointing to a wholly different register that is,
the distinction between productive and unproductive labour or between
the proletariat and the lumpen proletariat. His approach was to play the
machine-like productivity of the system as a whole against the unproductive
elements that corrupted that machine in order to put pressure on the towering
geometry that presented itself as an imperious law of nature until, as he said,
the spirit manifest[s] itself . How do you wrest public life from its private
shadow? Communism from capitalism? Spirit or Geist from the lonely
concurrence of its disaggregated parts? Strand rarely attempted to show how
Photography and God
this might be done but again and again he did try to see and feel how such an aim is
an innate desire of a fully realised human life.
68. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political
Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (London:
Penguin, 1990), p. 477.
69. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 104.
70. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 75.
71. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, pp. 6768.
72. Marx, Capital, pp. 443, 447.
73. Mikhail Bakunin, Marxism, Freedom, and the
State (London: Freedom Press, 1950), trans.
K.J. Kenafick, markup Natasha Morse, http://
www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/
works/mf-state/ch05.htm
The lump and the common man
Lumpen, to remind you, was Marxs name for those who live on the fringes of
the production and reproduction of society. In a sense, lumpen is simply the
condition of the market radicalised, or the condition of those, as Capital tells us,
who acknowledge no authority other than that of competition, of the coercion
exerted by the pressure of their reciprocal interests, just as in the animal kingdom
the war of all against all more or less preserves the conditions of existence of
every species.68 On one end of the spectrum, this included the aristocracy of
finance and the politicians that served them.69 On the other end was a long list
of lower-rent sorts that Marx characterised as the whole indefinite, disintegrated
mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohe`me.70 What
defined the lumpen as a group, whether of a high degree or a low, he wrote,
was a common financial science that worked with donations and loans and not
in the realm of the production and reproduction of society.71
Marxs class categories are sometimes understood erroneously in brute
sociological and economic terms, the most egregious example of which is to
simply equate lumpen with the poor and underemployed. Even more
misguided, they are sometimes assumed to be moral categories. Class, in Marxs
own terms, was a dialectical psychosocial and political-economic matter
structured by two poles, one tied to our animal nature and the other to our
human potential to realise autonomy through the artifice of society. This account
of class and consciousness is consistent throughout Marxs writings, first
developed at length in the 1844 manuscripts and carried through his later
economic writings. Human potential is realised, he argued, only when our
relation to the social whole is productive. In contrast, we revert to animal nature
when our capacity to support ourselves operates against or outside of the whole.
This is equally so in the social and economic margins of the rag picker and artist,
in the alienated anomie of the proletariat, in the gleeful self-alienation of the
bourgeoisie and their academic apologists, or in the opportunistic disavowal of
human nature by the finance aristocracy and their political benefactors.
Human and animal, artificial and natural tendencies are reinforced in all of us by
capitalism, which is what makes it both stepping stone and nemesis for the working
class. On the one hand, Marxs Capital tells us, the mere social contactdeveloped
by capitalisms organisation of production and consumption begets in most
industries a rivalry and a stimulation of the animal spirits, which heightens the
efficiency of each individual worker. On the other hand, that same social
contact also begets the opposing impulse: When the worker co-operates in a
planned way with others, we are told, he strips off the fetters of his
individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species.72
In this great and defining dialectic of competition and cooperation, the one thing
that is decidedly not being advocated for by Marx is Bakunins notion of Life,
delivered from all its governmental and doctrinaire barriers. Disenfranchisement
was itself what constituted a revolutionary class for Bakunin:
By the ower of the proletariat, I mean above all, that great mass, those millions of
non-civilised, disinherited, wretched and illiterates whom Messrs. Engels and Marx mean
to subject to the paternal regime of a very strong government. 73
Marx, in contrast, called such disenfranchisement from a meaningful politicaleconomic relation to state and economy a loss of . . . self . As lumpen,
Blake Stimson
man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions eating, drinking,
procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions
he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human
and what is human becomes animal.74
There is a long history of the lumpen politics developed by Bakunin and his heirs
that have served as a counterpoint to Marxs legacy, of course, and its politics is not
simple or unconflicted. Max Stirners founding proposal to transform the word
Lump into an honourable form of address just as the revolution had with the word
citizen made its way into Bakunins flower of the proletariat and Peter
Kropotkins adoption of animal solidarity as the ground for anarchist sociality.
However, we can begin to see the lumpen politics of our own era reborn on the
other side of the political divide in the mid-century neoconservative critique of
communism, and subsequently more broadly, of governance itself, as a God
that failed.75 More importantly for us now, that critique would subsequently
blossom into neoliberalisms reclamation and redirection of the anarchist
understanding of freedom as freedom from the state.
At the heart of that blossoming was a dream of spontaneous political action
directed against the state by those who fall outside of the productive economy.
Fanon, as we have already discussed, put it this way:
It is . . . in the lumpenproletariat that the insurrection will nd its urban spearhead . . . and
march proudly in the great procession of the awakened nation.76
The idealisation of the lumpen position outside the productive economy would
manifest itself in the political redefinition of labour against the state, desire against
the state, society against the state, etc. ideas that continue to define us broadly
now.77 Perhaps our most viable lumpen-political category for the left now remains
precarity which both updates the old relations of production for the new flexible
labour model and updates the sphere of free association for the internet age.78
While each of these efforts to associate economic non-productivity with political
agency is responding to a different problem bureaucratisation, on the right, and
poverty, colonialism, racism, casualisation, etc., on the left all share a foundational
distrust of governmentalityand a fundamental belief in adhocracyorad hoc social and
political association. Those on the right champion liberating so-called self-made
men and women from responsibility for others, while those on the left dream of
one version or another of this vision outlined by Huey Newton in 1970: As the
ruling circle continue to build their technocracy, more and more of the
proletariat will become unemployable, become lumpen, until they have become
the popular class, the revolutionary class.79
In contemporary artistic terms, such a lumpen politics often takes the form of
the throwaway or casualised image, the indiscriminate image that circulates
promiscuously, as described by Hito Steyerl in 2009: The poor image is a rag
or a rip; an AVI or a JPEG, a lumpen proletarian in . . . an alternative economy
of images . . . existing inside as well as beyond and under commercial media
streams.80 The multimodal freedom of existing inside as well as beyond and
under is equally the concern of postmodern political theory and art alike, and
we might take Steyerls work to stand for the best of our current understanding.81
The problem with this asystemic model of freedom a model that poses itself
against God, against the state, against labour is that what it liberates, more than
anything else, is the accumulation of capital. As one commentator looking at this
from the inside has baldly put it, freedom results in inequality. That is, the more
freedom there is in a system, the more unequal the outcomes become.82 For the
lumpen ideal, whether it is imagined for the finance aristocracy or la bohe`me or the
74. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical

Manuscripts of 1844, ed. by Dirk J. Struik, trans. by
Martin Mulligan (International Publishers:
Moscow.), http://www.marxists.org/archive/
marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm.
75. Karl Marx (with Friedrich Engels), The
German Ideology (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books,
1998), p. 222.
76. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
(New York: Grove Press, 1963), pp. 81, 130.
77. As in the work of Mario Tronti, Deleuze and
Guattari, and Pierre Clastres, for example.
78. We might take Alex Foti to be an exemplary
spokesperson for precarity in the best sense because
of his efforts to re-imagine its meaning, significance
and potential particularly if we see the wisdom of
his thought developing over time as illustrated by
this sequence of quotations arranged in
chronological order:
In post-industrial society, the precariat is
what the proletariat was in the industrial
society. http://translate.eipcp.net/strands/
02/raunig-strands02en/print
But we need to pose ourselves the
question of power and the institutional
interface. This is vital at this stage. http://
precariousunderstanding.blogsome.com/
2006/07/27/precarity-and-neuropeanidentity-an-interview-with-alex-foti/
In my opinion an opportunity was lost. My
intentions since I founded the May Day
movement was to create a union that
represented the precarious people. . . . This
to this day has never occurred. http://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=JS1Y9Okl4Lg
79. This lumpenization was to be the means to

anarchist social organization named by Newton as
Intercommunalism. Garrett Epps, Huey
Newton Speaks at Boston College, Presents Theory
of Intercommunalism, The Harvard Crimson,
19 November 1970.
80. Hito Steyerl, In Defense of the Poor Image,
e-flux journal, vol. 10, November 2009, http://
www.e-flux.com/journal/in-defense-of-thepoor-image/.
81. As Kerstin Stakemeier puts it, The
reconstruction of these processes of degradation
seem, for Steyerl, to involve the most significant
and also the most potentiated social acts. . . .
Steyerls In Free Fall annotates visual representations
of the consumption of an object over time, turning
away not only from Tretiakovs concentration on
production as a shared activity of the collective but
also from any consciously shared process of
individuals altogether to a possible collectivity
developed through chains of destruction in order to
provide a critical means to escape the
spectacularisation of political engagement in art
Photography and God
documentarism. . .. Stakemeier, Plane

Destructive, www.metamute.org/editorial/
articles/plane-destructive-recent-films-hitosteyerl#. Needless to say, we might take Strand to
stand for the spectacularisation of political
engagement in art documentarism that Steyerl is
said to escape from.
82. Banker and social theorist Kim Taipale quoted
in David Bollier, Power-Curve Society: The Future of
Innovation, Opportunity and Social Equity in the
Emerging Networked Economy (Washington, D.C.:
Aspen CS Program, 2013), p. 22.
83. Lauren Berlant and others, Precarity Talk: A
Virtual Roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith
Butler, Bojana Cvejic , Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar,
and Ana Vujanovic, TDR: The Drama Review, vol.
56, no. 4, Winter 2012, p. 166.
84. In relation to the spheres of civil law and
private welfare, the spheres of the family and civil
society, the state is on the one hand an external
necessity and the higher power to whose nature
their laws and interests are subordinate and on
which they depend. But, on the other hand, it is
their immanent end, and its strength consists in the
unity of its universal and ultimate end with the
particular interest of individuals, in the fact that
they have duties towards the state to the same extent
as they also have rights. Hegel, Philosophy of Right,
261, p. 283.
precariat, freedom is found in the flotsam and jetsam, human or otherwise, trailing
behind awider systemic crisis. Regardless of whether that crisis is understood to be
a function of capitalisms day-to-day creative destruction or a sign of its imminent
collapse, freedom as we have come to understand it now is detached from labour as
a social enterprise that was the basis of our great biological leap and drifts evermore
from the aim of democracy, socialism and communism to that of adhocracy in the
dross of an increasingly pervasive atmospheric or ambient spectacle.
If lumpen politics is now best named neoliberalism for the right and its primary
emotional register can be said to be the animal aggression associated with creative
destruction, the best name for the lefts version is precarious politics and its
primary emotional register is animal care or recognition of the suffering of
others. The impoverished lumpen object or image like Fanons petty
criminals, maids, and prostitutes or the chainworkers of our own day stands
for humanity at its base level, its animal level, for humanity forced to create its
social and political being on the fly with the available scraps at hand.
Such suffering and disenfranchisement call on our innate animal sympathies, of
course, just as they should, but we would be wise to agree with Lauren Berlant that
the shift in political identification that precarious politics represents from an
idiom of power, she says, as in the power of the state, to an idiom of care, as
in the care we have for those close to us, on the one hand, and those we feel
sorry for, on the other is an ambivalent one at best.83 By attaching us to the
suffering of individuals and detaching us from the power of institutions, the
politics of care allows us to exercise our innate capacity for sympathy and
experience our own vulnerability, but in so doing it isolates us and thereby
removes us from the mechanisms of social change.
Left theopolitics
Strand was trying to do something different. He was trying to get to the ontological
basis for freedom, the place from which it arises out of our bodies, just as the
lumpen idioms of aggression and care have so successfully accomplished in their
respective ways since the 1960s. But he was doing so in the old modernist
manner that reached for the ground of the idiom of power realised
mechanically through collective form, state form, and not for postmodernisms
freedom from governance.84
This meant that the challenge was getting the state right, of course a state that
takes the form of a moral demand, a state that expresses the promise held by that
great post-Cold-War update on the old dream of society itself, another world is
possible, a state that would itself be defined by process more than propositions and
thus lead to the withering away of the state. This is nowhere clearer than in Native
Land with its clearly articulated distinction between private and public interest
with its corporate conspiracies, private armies, and technique[s] of terror . . .
backed by millions of dollars, on the one hand, and senate committees, we the
people speaking out loud, and an organic sense of freedom arising from sea,
sky, and continent, on the other (Fig. 9). The mechanical abstraction of
democratic processes, of Hegels spirit of constitutions, which allow for the
welling up of freedom from its organic ground was the aim.
In the end, in other words, Strands left challenge to the rights theotechnical
New God was not to adopt the caring but powerless voice of sacrificial precarity
with its spiritual-but-not-religious hope that accumulated suffering will spark
spontaneous revolt. Instead, his was a theopolitical appeal, an impersonal
appeal for a workers church, a workers society, a workers state, a workers
economy, a workers technology rather than their lumpen equivalents. This is
Blake Stimson
85. Cesare Zavattini, Some Ideas on the Cinema,

Sight and Sound, vol. 23, no. 2, October
December 1953, pp. 649. Reprinted in Howard
Curle and Stephen Snyder (eds), Vittorio De Sica:
Contemporary Perspectives (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2000), p. 51.
86. The development of capitalist production
creates an average level of bourgeois society and
therefore an average level of temperament and
disposition amongst the most varied peoples. It is as
truly cosmopolitan as Christianity.. . . One man in
the abstract is worth just as much or as little as the
next man. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value
(Moscow: Progress Publishers), http://www.
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/
theories-surplus-value/ch24.htm
Fig. 9. Film still, Native Land, 1942. # Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive.
what made him a materialist and not a Bergsonian vitalist, a Morrisian romantic, or
a Fanonian spokesman for a lumpen nation. It is also what made him a moralist and
something quite like a monk. His work aimed to accomplish the same thing that a
good sermon or a good manifesto does: to recognise and affirm the embodied basis
of the public interest as a force that can effectively counter entrenched private
interests. Stand up and be counted, his work tried to say, see the beauty in
the world around you, believe in the truth that is larger than yourself, fight for
the soul of the actually existing abstractions available to you in church and state,
economy and technology. There is no other form of resistance.
In this regard, Strands approach was in league with the great Neorealist maxim
put forward by his collaborator Cesare Zavattini in 1952, Today, our attitude
would be one of revelation . . . a search for the most deeply hidden human
values, which is why we feel that the cinema must recruit . . . above all, living
souls, the morally richest people.85 Not only was Strands aim to open himself
to theophany, to revelation of the moral basis for society, the human material
. . . revolution is working with and thus to the great materialist ground of
communism, it was also to respond in kind with an equal integrity of form.
This is why his pictures were his woman, his children, his everything, the love
of his life: their abstract formal recognition of people and places mirrored the
abstraction of the rudimentary moral law do unto others as you would have them
do unto you that he recognised as a form in his encounter with those same
people and places. Those that knew him best were right: such a relation to the
world has little to do with specific people and everything to do with humanity
in the abstract. Barely able to acknowledge the particular needs and desires of
those around him, Strand was able to immerse himself fully in their innate
human capacity to reimagine those needs and desires in concert with others
through the blessing of abstraction.
At bottom, such abstraction is the threshold of becoming human, the threshold
of not being reduced to either animal or machine. This is an abstraction born of
monotheism and capitalism, among other things, but that makes it no less the
basis for class-consciousness.86 In the intercourse across the impersonal and
Photography and God
87. See note 28 above for a reminder of the original

ten-point program for a dictatorship of the
proletariat. To say that such a statist solution is a
necessary part of social change in no way challenges
the notion that the state might subsequently wither
away once real, substantive, popular
enfranchisement occurs but it is to say that calls to
dismantle the state from the start miss more than
they get right.
88. This is the enduring meaning of Hegels long
maligned adage, The state consists in the march of
God in the world, and its basis is the power of reason
actualizing itself as will, something that becomes
much clearer when it is read together with what
follows:
Any state, even if we pronounce it bad in the
light of our own principles, and even if we
discover this or that defect in it, invariably
has the essential moments of its existence
within itself (provided it is one of the more
advanced states of our time). But since it is
easier to discover deciencies than to
comprehend the afrmative, one may easily
fall into the mistake of overlooking the inner
organism of the state in favour of individual
aspects. The state is not a work of art; it
exists in the world, and hence in the sphere
of arbitrariness, contingency, and error, and
bad behaviour may disgure it in many
respects. But the ugliest man, the criminal,
the invalid, or the cripple is still a living
human being; the afrmative aspect
life survives in spite of such deciencies,
and it is with this afrmative aspect that we
are here concerned. [Hegel, Elements of the
Philosophy of Right, p. 279.]
alienated divide between self and the modern world, between photographer and
the New God, Strand sought to operate in the manner of the enlightened worker or
communist, in a planned way with others, as Marx put it, a way that would strip
off the fetters of his individuality, and develop the capabilities of his species.
Alienated collaboration of this sort is routinely fostered, expropriated and
spectacularised by capitalism, of course, just as it is ruthlessly exploited by
totalitarianisms of all kinds, just as it is regularly redirected and reinscribed by
the false gods of all sorts, but that makes it no less the measure of human
becoming, no less the horizon for a new religious impulse, no less the
standard of Hegels actual God, no less the faculty or instrument of
communisation.
It is nothing more than a decorous fairy tale of our consumer age to imagine that
meaningful social change can happen without some version or another of the
dictatorship of the proletariat, some version or another of a government run by
and for the working majority that extends the concept of human right from the
political to the economic sphere, from the right to vote to the right of equal
opportunity.87 This is the old and decidedly illiberal and unmelancholic
message that Strands work still whispers to us today if we choose to listen: it is
only by setting aside neoliberalisms pseudo-politics of animal aggression and
animal care, its critique of the state on behalf of its others, and risking the real
politics of power, the politics of clearly articulated purpose and righteous
demand for the abstract institutional being peculiar to our human nature and
necessary for its flourishing, that the promise of freedom can be realised.88
Freedom, in other words, can only be found in

Hegels spirit of constitutions or the political
disposition that,
is merely a consequence of the institutions
within the state, a consequence in which
rationality is actually present, just as
rationality receives its practical application
through action in conformity with the states
institutions. This disposition is in general. . .
the consciousness that my substantial and
particular interest is preserved and
contained in the interest and end of an
other (in this case, the state), and in the
latters relation to me as an individual. As a
result, this other immediately ceases to be
an other for me, and in my consciousness
of this, I am free. [Hegel, Elements of the
Philosophy of Right, p. 288.]
Such actually present or actually existing

rationality is what Marx had in mind as the missing
element when he derided Bakunins voluntarism by
saying The will, and not the economic conditions,
is the foundation of his social revolution. (Karl
Marx, Conspectus of Bakunins Statism and
Anarchy (1874), https://www.marxists.org/
archive/marx/works/1874/04/bakunin-notes.
htm.

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Photography and God

Photography and God1

1. Thank you to Stephanie Schwartz and Barnaby

Vassals of the common man

On the most general level, the comfortable label romantic socialist

3. Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism

Advance Access publication 19 March 2015

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 38.1 2015 11 35

theoretical and affective parameters in which Strands romantic socialism

4. This essay is intended only as an initial

Photography and God

Henceforth, slaves increasingly aimed not

11. E.P. Thompson, William Morris: From Romantic

This is how Homi Bhabha characterises that

14. Karl Marx, Preface, Capital Volume III: The

Born of a love/hate relationship, the contradictory modern dream of revolt

Seeing the world as image as cute or tedious, sublime or alien, aesthetic,

experience and its philistine corroboration by our immediately available and

The spirit of constitutions

Instead of the borderline respectability (and borderline uselessness) of the term

15. Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism

As such, Thompson is correct when he writes that

Photography and God

the left of what is in general possible, whose real

20. Arnold Beichman writing in the Washington

23. Georg W. F. Hegel, Hegel: The Letters, trans.

Photography and God

and the improvement of the soil

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist

20 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 38.1 2015

35. Quoted in Christina Kiaer, Imagine No

Photography and God

Taken to himself with love a dead thing

43. Strand: Under the Dark Cloth, 1989.

Photography and God

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 38.1 2015 23

non-contradictory human ends, by working through the machinic victories of art

Photography and God

The biological leap

53. Trachtenberg, in Paul Strand: Essays, p. 11.

26 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 38.1 2015

Photography and God

55. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters of

Equally if not more disturbing to secularisms faithful, is to consider Strands

61. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer,

This is just to make Hegels foundational dialectical

63. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis

Photography and God

67. As David Graeber described it in 2002, for

Elsewhere, he provides this even broader

(David Graeber, Are You An Anarchist? The

work. It would be a mistake, however, to use such an evaluation as a litmus test of

30 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 38.1 2015

Photography and God

The lump and the common man

74. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical

79. This lumpenization was to be the means to

Photography and God

documentarism. . .. Stakemeier, Plane

85. Cesare Zavattini, Some Ideas on the Cinema,

Photography and God

87. See note 28 above for a reminder of the original

Freedom, in other words, can only be found in