Photography and God

This essay takes as its starting point Paul Strand's call to synthesize a 'new religious impulse' to counter the theotechnical drive that was the main concern of his 1922 essay 'Photography and the New God'. 'Some may grind their teeth at such prose', Alan Trachtenberg once noted about Strand's call, while others have taken it to be a misguided Bergsonism, and others still have cast it as the first, vague reach for what would later emerge as a 'mawkish' romantic socialism. This paper risks a different tack: first, by working to take Strand's theological impulse seriously and on its own terms; second, by working to reconcile that impulse with his later political convictions and those of the larger critical, political tradition stemming from Hegel's foundational theory of the state as an 'actual God'; and, third, by considering the implications of such a theopolitical reconciliation for us now.