{
"data": {
"id": 151361,
"accession_number": "1983.202",
"share_license_status": "Copyrighted",
"tombstone": "Church, Rancho de Taos, New Mexico, 1931. Paul Strand (American, 1890\u20131976). Gelatin silver print; image: 9.2 x 11.9 cm (3 5/8 x 4 11/16 in.); matted: 30.6 x 35.6 cm (12 1/16 x 14 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund, 1983.202. \u00a9 Aperture Foundation, Inc., Paul Strand Archive",
"current_location": null,
"title": "Church, Rancho de Taos, New Mexico",
"creation_date": "1931",
"creation_date_earliest": 1931,
"creation_date_latest": 1931,
"artists_tags": [
"Jewish artists",
"male"
],
"culture": [
"America"
],
"technique": "gelatin silver print",
"support_materials": [],
"department": "Photography",
"collection": "PH - American 1900-1950",
"type": "Photograph",
"measurements": "Image: 9.2 x 11.9 cm (3 5/8 x 4 11/16 in.); Matted: 30.6 x 35.6 cm (12 1/16 x 14 in.)",
"dimensions": {
"image": {
"height": 0.092,
"height_inch": 3,
"height_inch_fraction": 0.625,
"width": 0.119,
"width_inch": 4,
"width_inch_fraction": 0.6875
},
"matted": {
"height": 0.306,
"height_inch": 12,
"height_inch_fraction": 0.0625,
"width": 0.356,
"width_inch": 14,
"width_inch_fraction": 0.0
}
},
"state_of_the_work": null,
"edition_of_the_work": null,
"copyright": "\u00a9 Aperture Foundation, Inc., Paul Strand Archive",
"inscriptions": [
{
"inscription": "Written in pencil on verso: \"SW-Arch-467 TI\"",
"inscription_translation": null,
"inscription_remark": null,
"sortorder": null
}
],
"exhibitions": {
"current": [
{
"id": 309669,
"title": "The Year in Review for 1983",
"description": "The Year in Review for 1983. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (February 22-April 8, 1984).",
"opening_date": "1984-02-22T05:00:00"
},
{
"id": 310243,
"title": "The Precisionist Aesthetic in American Art",
"description": "The Precisionist Aesthetic in American Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (January 24-April 9, 1989).",
"opening_date": "1989-01-24T05:00:00"
},
{
"id": 311876,
"title": "Legacy of Light: Seven Masters in Depth",
"description": "Legacy of Light: Seven Masters in Depth. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (November 20-February 2, 1996).",
"opening_date": "1996-11-20T05:00:00"
},
{
"id": 194095,
"title": "Icons of American Photography: A Century of Photographs from the Cleveland Museum of Art",
"description": "Icons of American Photography: A Century of Photographs from the Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (June 24-September 16, 2007).",
"opening_date": "2007-06-24T00:00:00"
},
{
"id": 299125,
"title": "From Riches to Rags: American Photography in the Depression",
"description": "From Riches to Rags: American Photography in the Depression. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (August 13-December 31, 2017).",
"opening_date": "2017-08-13T04:00:00"
}
],
"legacy": []
},
"provenance": [],
"find_spot": null,
"related_works": [],
"former_accession_numbers": [],
"did_you_know": "Built with mud, straw, and sun-baked adobe bricks in the early 1800s, this church is still an active place of worship today.",
"early_education_description": null,
"artlens_description": null,
"description": "The 18th-century adobe church of San Francisco de Assisi in Rancho de Taos, New Mexico, was an icon of pure form for modernist artists from Georgia O\u2019Keeffe and Ansel Adams to Paul Strand, who spent summers in Taos from 1930 to 1932. Ansel Adams also chose this view of the back with its sculptural buttresses, stating that \u201cit is the rear elevation that defines this building as one of the great architectural monuments of America.\u201d Strand's picture of this notable church explores the relationship between the three- and two-dimensional worlds. While remaining representational, it emphasizes the building\u2019s abstract qualities.",
"external_resources": {
"wikidata": [
"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q60781205"
],
"internet_archive": []
},
"citations": [
{
"citation": "Cleveland Museum of Art, Tom E Hinson. Catalogue of Photography. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1996.",
"page_number": "Reproduced: P. 336",
"url": ""
}
],
"url": "https://clevelandart.org/art/1983.202",
"images": {},
"alternate_images": [],
"creditline": "Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund",
"image_credit": null,
"sketchfab_id": null,
"sketchfab_url": null,
"gallery_donor_text": null,
"athena_id": 151361,
"creators": [
{
"id": 967,
"description": "Paul Strand (American, 1890\u20131976)",
"extent": null,
"qualifier": null,
"role": "artist",
"biography": "Paul Strand American, 1890-1976\r\n\r\nPaul Strand (born in New York City) was an influential advocate of the straight approach in creative photography. While a student at the Ethical Culture School in New York, Strand studied photography with Lewis Hine (1907-8). In 1908 he joined the Camera Club of New York and three years later traveled through Europe, making softly focused, manipulated photographs in the popular pictorial style. In the fall of 1911 Strand established himself as a freelance commercial photographer in New York and two years later began visiting the exhibitions of modern art at Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession galleries.\r\n\tBetween 1914-17, stimulated by his contact with Stieglitz and avant-garde American and European art, Strand abandoned pictorialism for images that expressed an interest in formal concerns and the dynamism of contemporary urban life. He experimented with abstraction and movement and candid portraiture of people on the street. Excited by Strand's innovative work, Stieglitz exhibited his pictures at \"291\" in 1916 and featured them in the final two issues of Camera Work (October 1916; June 1917). In 1917 Strand expressed his belief in a pure photographic aesthetic, stressing the objectivity of the medium and its ability to produce \"a range of almost infinite tonal values which lie beyond the skill of the human hand.\"\r\n\tThe following year Strand served as an x-ray technician in the Army Medical Corps. After his year of service, he returned to New York and in 1920 collaborated with painter/photographer Charles Sheeler on the avant-garde film Manhatta (originally titled New York the Magnificent). Throughout the 1920s Strand made his living as a filmmaker, only occasionally making photographs. He pursued both film and creative photography in the 1930s and early 1940s; by 1945, however, when his images were featured in a one-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, still photography had once more become his primary focus. After visiting France in 1950 he decided to settle there, and over the following two decades traveled and photographed in Europe and Africa.\r\n\tStrand's work has been widely exhibited. Retrospectives have been mounted by the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1945), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1971, and tour), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1973), and numerous traveling exhibitions have been organized, including Paul Strand: An American Vision by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1990). He was named an Honorary Member of the American Society of Magazine Photographers (1963) and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1973). M.M.",
"name_in_original_language": null,
"birth_year": "1890",
"death_year": "1976",
"use_in_caption": true,
"include_extent": false,
"weight": 1
}
],
"legal_status": "accessioned",
"accession_date": "1983-12-05T00:00:00",
"sortable_date": 1931,
"date_added_to_oa": null,
"date_text": "1931",
"collapse_artists": false,
"on_loan": false,
"recently_acquired": false,
"record_type": "object",
"conservation_statement": null,
"has_conservation_images": false,
"cover_accession_number": null,
"is_nazi_era_provenance": false,
"impression": null,
"alternate_titles": [],
"is_highlight": false,
"updated_at": "2026-05-01 06:51:10.758000"
}
}