In presenting these images of Portsmouth Square, in San Francisco’s Chinatown, I’ve tried to keep in mind some of the ideas of Paul Strand, the great modernist and realist photographer.
Strand was a radical, a founder of the Photo League in New York City in the 1930s, and a teacher who guided its work. After World War Two, as McCarthyite hysteria gripped the country, and especially the world of media and the arts, he was put on a blacklist (along with the Photo League itself) by the U.S. Justice Department. He went into exile in France, never returning to live in the U.S. For the next three decades he photographed people in traditional communities, and in newly independent countries during the period of decolonization and national liberation.
Strand was one of the founders of modernism in photography – the idea that photographs had to be connected with the world and depict it cleanly and simply. He combined those visual ideas with social justice politics, not in a dogmatic or simplistic way, but in an effort to create socially meaningful art with its own philosophy and set of principles.
Strand’s books were documents about place, presenting people in the context of their physical world. The subject of this set of photographs is also a place, one very familiar to me over many years – Portsmouth Square in San Francisco. These photographs were taken over 20 years. I’ve sequenced them, as Strand might have done, I think, in an order that emphasizes their social, as well as visual, content.
I was an organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. We set up a Garment Workers Center on Commercial Street, a block from the square. The workers who came into the center were Chinese women and men who worked in shops all over the city, from outer Third Street to Chinatown itself. I was just beginning to take photographs in a conscious way in those days, and because I was a union organizer, there was never a possibility that the sweatshop owners would let me inside to document the conditions. I was a union militant, interested and committed to documenting work, so this was a big regret. But walking through Portsmouth Square every day gave me a sense of the lives of people in this community, in the hours they spent outside the sewing shops.
PHOTOGRAPHS OF PORTSMOUTH SQUARE – A TRIBUTE TO PAUL STRAND
Photographs and text by David Bacon
Stansbury Forum, 3/13/22
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