Strand, Paul

Paul Strand, (born October 16, 1890, New York, New York, U.S.—died March 31, 1976, Oregeval, France), photographer whose work influenced the emphasis on sharp-focused, objective images in 20th-century American photography.

When he was 17 years old, Strand began to study photography with Lewis W. Hine, who was later noted for his photographs of industrial workers and immigrants. At Hine’s urging, Strand began to frequent “291,” the gallery begun by Alfred Stieglitz, the leader of the Photo-Secession group. There, Strand met Stieglitz and was exposed to the avant-garde paintings of Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, and Georges Braque that were on display in the gallery. These works inspired him to emphasize abstract form and pattern in his photographs, such as Shadow Pattern, New York and Wall Street (both 1915). In one of the boldest photographs of the period, White Fence (1916), Strand deliberately destroyed perspective to build a powerful composition from tonal planes and rhythmic pattern.

Strand rejected the then-popular style of Pictorialism, which emulated the effects of painting in photographs by manipulating negatives and prints, in favour of achieving the minute detail and rich, subtle tonal range afforded by the use of large-format cameras. He relied on strictly photographic methods, realizing that the camera’s objectivity is at once its limitation and its chief asset. The purity and directness of Strand’s depictions of natural forms and architecture presaged the work of other American photographers who sought to express abstract formal values through the unadorned photographic image. Strand’s objective photographs of urban subjects were published by Stieglitz in the last two issues of his influential magazine Camera Work and were given a show at “291.” Much of the work in that show featured everyday objects, such as bowls and furniture, which were sharply lit and shot at such close range that they verge on seeming abstract.

After serving in World War I, Strand collaborated with the painter and photographer Charles Sheeler on the documentary film Mannahatta. While working as a freelance movie cameraman, he devoted his free time to still photography, capturing the beauty of natural forms through dramatic close-ups in Colorado (1926) and Maine (1927–28). In his photographs of the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec (1929) and of New Mexico (1930), he achieved a new understanding of landscape, revealing a deep awareness of what he called “the spirit of place.”

In the 1930s, Strand became increasingly concerned with addressing social issues, and so he switched his focus from photography to motion pictures as a means to reach a greater audience and to tell a clearer story. Appointed chief photographer and cinematographer by the Mexican government in 1933, he made the motion picture Redes (“The Wave”) about Mexican fishermen. He returned to the United States and worked as a cameraman for the director Pare Lorentz on the government-sponsored documentary film The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936). In 1937 Strand formed Frontier Films to make documentaries with social and political content. Of the nonprofit company’s seven films, Strand photographed only Native Land (1942).

After World War II, unhappy with the political situation in the United States, Strand moved to France and worked throughout Europe. From then on, much of his work focused on issues of community life. In his later years he produced a number of photographic books in which he could mimic the effects of film by laying out a narrative sequence of images, often accompanied by text. His books from this period include Time in New England (1950), with Nancy Newhall; La France de profil (1952; “France in Profile”), with Claude Roy; Un Paese (1955; “A Country”), with Casare Zavattini; and Tir A’Mhurain, Outer Hebrides (1962).