Paul Strand

(b New York, 16 Oct 1890; d Orgeval, nr Paris, 31 March, 1976). American photographer. He studied at the Ethical Culture High School, New York, where in 1908 he enrolled for a course in photography given by Lewis Hine. During this period he visited Alfred Stieglitz's gallery, 291, in New York, where the work of the Photo-Secession convinced him that the camera could be used as the instrument for aesthetic as well as documentary purposes. To further his skill in the techniques associated with more 'artistic' photography, he joined the Camera Club of New York and learnt how to make enlargements and to print in platinum, gum bichromate and carbon. After 1913 his work evolved slowly from the soft-focus symbolism of Pictorial photography to the images of greater definition in his urban street scenes and portraits of 1915 (e.g. Wall Street, New York, 1915; Millerton, NY, Aperture Found., Strand Archv; see fig.). This transformation embodied concepts of abstract pictorial organization, stimulated by examples he had seen in the Armory Show of 1913, in exhibitions at the 291 gallery and in reproductions in Stieglitz's photographic journal Camera Work. In 1916 Stieglitz, who considered Strand the only photographer of merit coming to the fore, organized an exhibition of his work at 291, which he featured in the last two issues of Camera Work in 1917. Included in the exhibition were images in which ordinary artefacts, among them crockery and porch furniture, were converted into abstract statements of form and light, for example Abstraction, Bowls (1916; photogravure reproduction in Camera Work, 1917). The eventual evolution of Strand's vision and his preference for sharply defined, pre-visualized, large format imagery were a consequence of his practical experience as well as his awareness of contemporary artistic idioms. As a photographer for the US Army Medical Corps during his service in World War I in 1918-19, he made X-ray plates and close-ups of medical practices that helped to confirm his choice. His chosen direction can be seen in the urban scenes of the 1920s and in the close-ups of forms in nature that claimed his interest more strongly in the late 1920s.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Strand, Paul (1890-1976), American photographer and film-maker, and a key figure in the development of modernism. He attended the Ethical Culture School in New York, a progressive institution where the teachers included Charles Caffin, an art historian and critic who had written the path-breaking Photography as a Fine Art (1901), and Lewis Hine. Later Strand remembered it was Hine who introduced him to the world of artistic photography through a field trip to Alfred Stieglitz's Gallery 291. After graduating in 1909, Strand worked, travelled, and built a porfolio of photographs that he eventually showed to Stieglitz, who gave him a one-man exhibition in March 1916. Strand's vision reflected the vibrant interest in modernism in the New York art world. The Cubist principles of Cézanne and Picasso had greatest influence on him at this point, and in the summer of 1916 he embarked on a series of compositional studies of cups, bowls, and fruit, and another of chairs and porch rails that resulted in abstract photographs of shapes—solids and voids, lights and shadows. He then produced images of everyday life in New York: forceful, astute studies of pedestrians, vendors, workers, and architecture that Stieglitz praised as ‘the direct expression of today’. Stieglitz devoted his last issue of Camera Work (1917) to Strand's work, and reprinted the photographer's statement from the short-lived periodical Seven Arts, which now appears almost as a manifesto of modernist, straight photography. Photography's ‘complete uniqueness of means’, Strand wrote, was in its ‘absolute unqualified objectivity’. He prescribed, for a photographer with ‘honesty, no less than intensity of vision [that t]his means a real respect for the thing in front of him, expressed in terms of chiaroscuro … through a range of almost infinite tonal values’.

Strand's work in the 1920s was characterized by sharp, close-up compositions based on nature and machines, but he turned increasingly to film-making. New York the Magnificent (1921, later retitled Mannahatta), with Charles Sheeler, was a seven-minute observation of the city in motion. Films from the 1930s were more political. Redes (1934, released in the USA as The Wave in 1937), filmed in Mexico, examined the economic conditions of fishermen in a village near Vera Cruz. After returning to New York in 1934, Strand affiliated with Harold Clurman's Group Theater and the radical film-making association Nykino. Through the USDA's Resettlement Administration, he worked on Pare Lorenz's Dust Bowl documentary The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936). With Leo Hurwitz, Ralph Steiner, and others, he founded the progressive Frontier Films (1937-42). His primary project of this period, Native Land (1941), reported on the persecution of 1930s labour activists.

After the Second World War, Strand worked with several writers to produce books interpreting various locales, completing the first one, Time in New England, with Nancy Newhall (1950), and the others after moving to France in 1950 to avoid McCarthyism. Strand's papers are at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona; negatives at the Paul Strand Archive, Aperture Foundation, New York.

— Patricia Johnston

Bibliography

• Greenough, S., Paul Strand: An American Vision (1990).
• Stange, M. (ed.), Paul Strand: Essays on his Life and Work (1990).
• Hambourg, M. M., Paul Strand: Circa 1916 (1998)