Bowls (photograph)

Bowls (1916) by Paul Strand

Bowls, also known as Abstraction, Bowls, is a black and white photograph taken by Paul Strand in 1916. The photograph has elements of cubism and abstractionism, and exemplifies his style at the time.

History and description

Strand became motivated by the work of Cubist painters and sculptors like Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Constantin Brâncuși, to create photographs of objects inspired by their geometrical forms. In this picture, one of several taken during a stay in Twin Lakes, Connecticut, he took a close-up of four regular kitchen bowls. The photograph highlights their circular shapes, and the effect of light and shadows on these objects. The overlapping composition becomes almost abstract and not easily recognizable at first glance. Michael North stated that in this picture "soft focus and composition clearly collude to dilute the referential just enough to make four bowls into a work of art".

Strand geometrical photographs were published at the magazine Camera Work, in 1917, and where praised by Alfred Stieglitz himself, who stated that "The work is brutally direct; devoid of all flim-flam; devoid of trickery and of any 'ism'; devoid of any attempt to mystify an ignorant public, including the photographers themselves."

Public collections

There are prints of this photograph in several public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Cleveland Museum of Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles.