Lathe, Akeley Machine Shop, New York,Manufacture,ca. 1923
Gelatin silver print
25.3x20.2 cm(10x8 in.)
86.XM.686.4

Modernism in general has been defined by Meyer Schapiro as an attitude that allowed art to become more "deeply personal, more intimate, and concerned with experiences of a subtle kind [by] artists [who] are willing to search further and to risk experiments or inventions which in the past would have been inconceivable because of fixed ideas of the laws and boundaries of the arts." In choosing such unexpected subjects as industrial artifacts, Strand and Renger-Patzsch risked having their meaning misunderstood, for they were expressing themselves as poets, not as reporters. Like the lyrical poet, the photographer possesses an acute and exhilarating respect for the eminence and reality of the object; the new object that has been created in the form of a photograph has no other reason to exist than the pleasure it brings. Poet-photographers make up their own language from picture to picture and keep us interested in spare and unusual compositions by not photographing in the ways we expect. The poetic photograph has the power-sometimes brutally direct-to create deep and unnameable feelings about commonplace objects.
(EDWARD WESTON related to-->> 180, 188)

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• Masters of Photography