Paul Strand

Born: New York, 16 Oct 1890; Died: Orgeval, near 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). 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.

From 1916 and during most of the 1920s, Strand and Stieglitz maintained a close friendship, sharing mutual interests in photography and the other visual arts, in criticism and in sports. Towards the end of the 1920s their ideas began to diverge, as Stieglitz became more involved with his concept of ‘equivalency’, of finding visual equivalents for his subjective feelings, while Strand sought to embody in his work what, for him, were newly recognized social concepts. In 1921 Strand and the painter Charles Sheeler collaborated on a short film about New York, inspired perhaps by Walt Whitman’s poetry, and throughout the decade Strand earned a living as a freelance film photographer, covering news and sporting events as well as working on publicity and feature films. In 1932 the strain caused by the divergent positions held by Strand and Stieglitz put an end to their associations, and Strand moved to Taos, NM, where he extended his vision to include landscape, artefacts and people in an effort to suggest, in still photographs, their interrelationship.

During the 1930s, as Strand became more aware of the social dislocation engendered by the Depression, he turned to the motion picture as a form more capable than still photography of embodying social ideas. Strand’s decision in 1933 to turn his attention entirely to making films was in response to an opportunity offered by the Mexican government to produce socially useful films, but it can also be seen as a logical outcome of his 12 years of experience in the medium. Following the completion of Redes (The Wave; 1932–4), a film on the conditions in the Mexican fishing village of Alvarado, and a trip in 1935 to the USSR, Strand became one of the founders in 1936 of the documentary film cooperative Frontier Films in New York, in order to produce a series of films concerned with political and social issues.

Unable to continue working in film after the beginning of World War II, Strand’s experiences with the film form nevertheless continued to influence his approach to still photography, which he took up again after 1943. From 1945 his objective was to present a series of still images in book format that would embrace the concept both of image sequencing characteristic of film and of communication gained through the written, rather than the spoken, word. The themes for these books were inspired by his preoccupation with the concept behind The Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, which involved ordinary people and the social culture in which they lived. He began by working with Claude Roy in France, where he produced La France de profil (Lausanne, 1952), after which Strand continued to seek writers whose texts would provide appropriate counterpoints to the visual images he made in Italy, the Hebrides, Egypt and Ghana. His photographic books include: Un paese (Turin, 1954), Tir a’Mhurain, Outer Hebrides (Dresden, 1962), Living Egypt (Dresden, 1969) and (published posthumously) Ghana, an African Portrait (New York, 1976). In each case he sought to give visual substance to the distinctive character of the people and places on which he focused his large-format view-camera. Strand expected his images to reveal the wonders of nature, the beauty and dignity of individuals, and the intricate craftsmanship of the artefacts they produced, whether dwellings in West Africa or power-stations in Egypt.

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