Paul Strand 1890-1976

By Patrick Heath

Paul Strand, Porch Railings, Twin Lakes, Connecticut, Silver Platinum Print, (32.4 x 24.6 cm), The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Paul Strand (October 16, 1890 – March 31, 1976), was an American photographer and filmmaker credited with propelling photography into the modernist space during the 20th Century. Strand’s commitment to ‘straight photography’ across a myriad of genres demonstrated the breadth and strength of the medium, vindicating the existence of the photographer as artist and enabling the success of an American generation. Strand’s itinerant professional career spanned the globe, where all around, he actively embraced both landscapes and people. Somewhat abandoning the ‘l’art pour l’art’ mantra of his fin de siècle contemporaries, Strand was crucial in forging a new vision for the photography of his age- photography that celebrated the spiritual and social power it could wield, photography that embraced realism and abstraction in the same breath.

Paul Strand was born on October 16, 1890, in New York to Bohemian parents, Jacob and Matilda Stransky. His father’s success as a merchant in the city provided the young Strand with a comfortable upbringing. Strand’s passion for photography began in 1902, aged just 12, upon receiving a camera as a gift from his parents. Five years later, in 1907, he enrolled at the Ethical Culture School where, under the watchful and inspiring eye of Lewis W. Hine, Strand was exposed to the likes of Steichen, White, Kasebier, and Cameron at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery. It was Stieglitz himself that provided Strand with the mentorship and means to take his passion (deemed hobby by his father) for photographic arts into the professional realm. By 1916 he had his first solo exhibition at 291, displaying works that would dramatically augment the landscape of American photography. His pictures from this time demonstrate a thorough break from the prevailing pictorialism of the time, the techniques of which he had become invested in during his association the Camera Cub of New York; Strand was determined to capture the pure, unadulterated truth, no matter the subject. From the El (1915) and Wall Street (1916), both capture the contrasting interplay between light and shadow in a post-industrial New York, each image making sure to place people in the urban environment as reference. Strand produced a truly remarkable series of photographs in Connecticut during this period; the works, including Abstraction, Twin Lakes, Connecticut (1916), are the first examples of exaggerated and prepense abstractions made for the camera. By experimenting with camera rotation, natural lighting, shadows, and shapes; Strand was successful in creating captivating patterns of geometry and soft, curving silhouettes.

Throughout the 1920’s, Strand continued to live and work in New York, moving in the artistic circles he had been introduced to by Stieglitz. By this point, he was enthralled with an early form of street-photography, using dummy lenses and other ingenious techniques to capture ‘portraits of people such as you see in the New York parks and places, sitting around, without their being conscious of being photographed’. His Blind Woman, New York (1916) is a shining example of these images, literally brining into sharp focus the disaffected, writhing underbelly of New York’s deprived neighbourhoods. Around this time, Strand began to take politics more seriously, slowly embracing the tenets of Marxist political philosophy. Strand pursued a new medium in his early thirties, quickly developing an affinity for the virtues of filmmaking. From his first film in 1921, Manhattana, Strand would take on important social and political issues in his cinema, working for the Mexican government, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Pare Lorentz, and starting his own studio, Frontier Films,

Strand spent the latter part of his life and career oversees, predominantly in Europe with his third wife, Hazel. He settled in Orgeval, France, in 1951 with "the world at his doorstep”. His later work is marked by a stark realism; photographs of the rugged landscapes of Mexico, Egypt, Romania, and the Scottish Outer Hebrides dominate this period. Strand’s return to the still image brought with it a collection of photo books that he termed ‘portraits of place’; these included: Time in New England (1950), La France de Profil (1952), Un Paese (featuring photographs of Luzzara and the Po River Valley in Italy, Einaudi, 1955), Tir a'Mhurain / Outer Hebrides (1962), Living Egypt (1969) and Ghana: An African Portrait (1976). Over the course of a prodigious career, Strand achieved his artistic excellence by rejecting the manipulative tendencies of pictorial photographers who came before him. Working with exceptional rigour and fidelity has singled him out as one of the most influential artists of the last century; he left a clearly definable impression on the achievements of modernism. Paul Strand died aged 85 on March 31st, 1976, in Orgeval, Yvelines. In 1984 he was posthumously inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum.

Bibliography

Department of Photographs, ‘Paul Strand (1890–1976)’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pstd/hd_pstd.htm 

 ‘The cool photographic gaze of Paul Strand’, Christie’s,  https://www.christies.com/features/Paul-Strand-a-collecting-guide-9766-1.aspx

‘How Paul Strand Paved the Way For Photographic Modernism’, AnOther,https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/8482/how-paul-strand-paved-the-way-for-photographic-modernism