Paul Strand (1890-1976) Grapes, Charente, 1951 Gelatin silver print, printed no later than 1976; flush-mounted to thin card, tipped to cardboard mount, annotated 'Master' by Hazel Strand in pencil, and with the photographer's typed reproduction instructions label and a white credit label with annotations in ink, all on the reverse, framed. 9 5/8 x 7 5/8 in. (24.5 x 19.4 cm.) sheet 9 7/8 x 8 in. (25.1 x 20.3 cm.) mount 10 1/2 x 8 5/8 in. (26.7 x 21.9 cm.) Footnotes: Provenance Zabriskie Gallery, Paris Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1980 Literature Paul Strand and Claude Roy, La France de Profil (Lausanne, 1952), p. 118 Paul Strand: A Retrospective Monograph - The Years 1950-1968 (New York: Aperture, 1971), p. 167 Calvin Tomkins, Paul Strand: Sixty Years of Photographs (New York: Aperture, 1976), p. 166 Paul Strand and Claude Roy, La France de Profil (New York: Aperture, 2001), p. 116 Note In 1950, amid the oppressive political climate of McCarthy-era America, a disillusioned Paul Strand relocated to France, where he would remain for the rest of his life. His first project there was La France de Profil (1952), a collaboration with the poet Claude Roy. What began as a portrait of a single French village soon grew into a rich tapestry of images woven from the vistas and visages of the French countryside. Strand made Grapes, Charente in the heart of Cognac country, a region sustained for centuries by its vineyards, farmers, and merchants. Though Strand generally avoided intervening with his subjects, he broke with tradition in the case of this image. As historian and writer Calvin Tomkins notes in Paul Strand: Sixty Years of Photographs, 'In a rare instance of manipulating his subject, Strand arranged this photograph by combining the bunch of grapes with pesticide-sprayed grape leaves he fancied for the composition.' Claude Roy's accompanying text in La France de Profil underscores the choice: 'A bunch of grapes is less a work of nature than a work of art. And this still life is not as inanimate as one might think. Man lives in it, on every centimeter of leaf, of pulp, of matter. It is he who has pruned the vines, covered the green leaf with blue copper sulfate, dusted each bunch with sulfur and copper-lime, and cut back the excess vegetation. You are looking at a grape. Learn to see in it a man, and his patience, and his ingenuity, and his torment, and his happiness. France is a country where there is no longer any inhuman nature.' (Claude Roy, La France de Profil, p. 119). Lifetime gelatin silver prints of this image are exceedingly rare. At the time of this writing, only two others are known to have been offered at auction. Vintage prints are held in institutional collections including the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City (2002.6); the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1980-21-207 and 2015-2-2); and the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson (76.11.76 and 84.58.67). For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com For further information about this lot please visit the lot listing