New York Photography Exhibition Poster

The image referenced in this poster is Paul Strand's Wall Street (1915), one of the founding photographs of American modernism and Strand's decisive break from the painterly Pictorialist style that had dominated art photography since the 1890s. The photograph shows rush-hour pedestrians passing the recently completed J. P. Morgan & Co. building at 23 Wall Street, their long horizontal shadows set against the building's deep rectangular window recesses.

Strand was twenty-four when he made the photograph. He had been a student of the documentary photographer Lewis Hine at the Ethical Culture School, and through Hine had been introduced to Alfred Stieglitz, whose 291 Gallery showed European modernist painting alongside experimental photography. Under Stieglitz's influence Strand had begun moving away from soft-focus Pictorialism towards what he called “straight” photography: sharp, unmanipulated, attentive to the geometry of the real world. Wall Street is the canonical example. Strand himself described what he was after as “a kind of movement” that was “abstract and controlled.”

The Morgan building's deep blank windows — Strand later called them “sinister windows, blind shapes” — and the diminutive figures dwarfed against them have invited reading as a critique of corporate finance, though Strand was clear that the formal composition came first. Stieglitz published Wall Street in Camera Work in 1916 as one of six Strand images that effectively launched his career, and the photograph appeared in his first solo show at 291 the same year. Only two vintage platinum prints of the photograph are known to survive: one at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the other at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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