During his lifetime, Paul Strand’s work was alternately praised, puzzled and ignored, before finally being recognised as a major contribution to twentieth-century photography. From the outset, Strand signalled his respect for reality by choosing his subjects from nature, people and the artefacts they had constructed. Along with these predilections, he favoured large-format equipment, sharp lenses and simple, unmanipulated but fully realised processing methods. He saw the photographer as an explorer – one who brings back what he or she discovers from the real world, rather than one who relies on imagination for inspiration. At the same time, his keen attention to the formal aspects of the camera image gave his realism its distinctive aesthetic character.
Strand was born in New York City on 16 October 1890 to Bohemian Jewish parents. The extended family, including grandparents whose ancestors had emigrated to the United States in the late 1840s, lived a relatively comfortable life on the city’s Upper West Side. Strand came of age during the Progressive Era – a crucial period in the development of both American social thought and American photography. The presence of large numbers of recent immigrants living in slum conditions inspired Progressives to seek social change through education and legislation. As for photography, the advent of simplified equipment and easier processing methods had transformed the medium. It had become at once a popular hobby, a more commercialised professional pursuit, and a mode of artistic expression.
Strand’s attendance at the Ethical Culture School exposed him to progressive thought and, in particular, the photographic work of Lewis W. Hine, who undoubtedly passed on his interest in social photography to his students.
Hine, in turn, introduced Strand to Alfred Stieglitz, then the spokesman for the most advanced wing of American camera aesthetics known as the Photo-Secession. Contact with these two figures, and the ideas that emanated from them, formed the central core of Strand’s concept of photographic art as concerned with real life, but also as formally resolved in the manner of all significant artistic expression.
Introduced to modern art at Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession Gallery 291 and the 1913 Armory Show, Strand became one of the first American photographers to experiment seriously with Cubist ideas by turning the camera lens on real objects. The resulting images, taken in the summer of 1916 while on holiday at Twin Lakes, Connecticut, were an unprecedented group of geometric abstractions based on bowls, fruit and structural elements. In the same year, he turned his attention to depicting the grit of urban New York – at the time considered an ‘unartistic’ subject suitable for documentation. His views of everyday structures and his portraits of ordinary street people – notably a blind newsagent – were noted for their freshness of vision and structural rigour.
In 1920, Strand continued his interest in the city as he embarked on another aspect of his career that was to prove significant for his future activities. He collaborated with the painter and photographer Charles Sheeler on a short film called Manhatta, based on Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. This work captured the vibrancy and energy of the city in much the same way as Strand’s stills of the period.
Before being drafted into the army in World War I, Strand exhibited at Gallery 291 and his work was featured in the last two issues of the Photo-Secessionist magazine Camera Work. Throughout the 1920s, he and his first wife, Rebecca James, maintained a close friendship with Stieglitz and his wife, Georgia O’Keeffe, helping with commissions, working on publications and visiting frequently in New York City and at their summer home on Lake George, New York. While earning a living as a freelance cinematographer during this period, Strand was able to produce an unprecedented series of still images of machinery, beginning with views of his Akeley film camera and extending to the machine tools used in the camera’s repair shop. This series was followed in the second half of the decade by intense close-ups of natural forms, as Strand became less entranced by the commercialism of the era, turned to nature and the simpler life. His work from this period was exhibited first at the Intimate Gallery and then at An American Place, both under the direction of Stieglitz.
In 1932, Strand’s career as an independent cinematographer was affected by the move of the film industry to the West Coast In addition, he felt unsettled by developments in his personal life and in society at large, and left New York for New Mexico. Shortly thereafter, he travelled to Mexico to assist the newly installed government in the production of socially relevant images. His efforts resulted in a series of still images of peasants, architecture and religious statuary, which were published in 1940 by his second wife, Virginia Stevens, as a portfolio of intaglio prints entitled The Mexican Portfolio.
His main task, however, was to create a re-enacted documentary called Redes (The Wave), funded by the Ministry of Education. Filmed in the port village of Alvarado, it was about a strike by Mexican fishermen against a predatory owner of the boat and its catch.
Despite an unsuccessful trip to the Soviet Union in 1935 to investigate working with director Sergei Eisenstein, Strand continued his involvement with documentary filmmaking. On his return to the United States, he worked on the federally funded Resettlement Administration film The Plow That Broke the Plains. Settling back in New York City, he became president of a newly formed production company, Frontier Films. In this capacity he helped produce a series of politically charged documentaries, the most famous of which was Native Land, based on the findings of the La Follette Senate Investigating Committee into the prevalence of labour spies in industry.
He also became active as an adviser and teacher in the Photo League, an organisation of still photographers concerned with portraying street life in working-class neighbourhoods.
These activities established Strand as a left-wing individual whose views would become unwelcome in the Cold War atmosphere that followed the end of the Second World War.
By the mid-1940s, the difficulty of funding documentary films led Strand to consider other forms of disseminating his work.
Following a retrospective of his still photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in 1945, he and assistant curator Nancy Newhall embarked on a publication project that eventually appeared in 1950 as Time in New England. Conceived during the Second World War, the text and image were designed so that the photographs would not illustrate the words, but the two together would embody the story of the nation’s democratic heritage as it had developed in New England. Strand discovered that his cinematic experience was useful in arranging the images and, despite his disappointment with the book’s production, it became the model for the later publications that the photographer conceived and executed after moving to France with his third wife, Hazel Kingsbury, in 1950.
The move, prompted by the harsh political climate in the United States at the time, provided Strand with a 25-year period of remarkable activity, both in terms of still photography and book publishing. Initially, he set out to create a portrait of a single French village, loosely based on the much earlier American poetry classic Spoon River Anthology. But as he criss-crossed France in search of an ideal location, he produced instead a portrait of an entire non-industrial people. The resulting publication, La France de Profil, written and designed by Claude Roy, evokes a sense of a rural country lovingly depicted but already on the verge of disappearing.
The one village that Strand had been looking for in France in vain materialised in 1954 in Luzzara, Italy, the birthplace of the neo-realist screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, who provided the text for Strand’s next project, entitled Un Paese.
In the 1950s and early 60s, Strand also travelled to the Hebrides, Egypt at the invitation of President Nasser, and Ghana at the behest of President Nkrumah. The resulting publications – all but the one on Ghana designed by Strand – confirmed his belief in the published photograph in book form as a vehicle that could reach a wide audience.
All the while, he was also photographing in the garden of his home in Orgeval, a small village about 35 kilometres west of Paris. During his stay in France, he also made portraits of well-known figures in the arts and sciences, including the painters Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso and the chemist Irène Joliot-Curie, in the unfulfilled expectation of creating a book that would combine the flowers of French culture with actual botanical examples.
After a debilitating illness, Strand died at his home in Orgeval in March 1976. In addition to the publications he oversaw himself, he left enough material for his publisher, Aperture, to produce five more books of photographs and texts.
Strand’s concept of photographic art and his attitude to its dissemination have been a source of confusion, because he seemed to hold two somewhat conflicting ideas. From the outset, he charged extraordinarily high prices for individual prints, both in platinum and silver, arguing, like his mentor Stieglitz, that photographic art deserved the same respect in the marketplace as works of handmade graphic art. But his belief that art should not be confined to an elite audience also led him to seek formats that would bring his work to a wider, less affluent public.
When the making of films proved impractical, he settled on the publication of books as a democratic instrument over which he could exercise the kind of control he felt the artist must retain. Thus he found the means to realise, consciously or not, the lessons about art and its social use that he had learned from his earliest experiences with Lewis W. Hine and Alfred Stieglitz.
