Paul Strand
The New Yorker who pushed photography toward uncompromising directness in the 1910s, then spent six decades photographing the world's peoples with the same patient, undeceiving eye.
Paul Strand was among the photographers who decided, in the years around 1916, that the future of photography lay not in imitating painting but in being exactly what it was: a machine for recording fact with complete precision. He carried this conviction through six decades of work, photographing New York street scenes, Mexican villages, New England landscapes, Italian communes, Scottish islands, and Ghanaian markets with the same undisguised attention — a body of work so consistent in its moral seriousness that it became the standard against which American documentary photography measured itself.
Formation
Strand was born in New York City in 1890. As a student at the Ethical Culture School he studied under Lewis Hine, the documentary photographer whose images of child labour were already influencing American social reform. Hine introduced him to the work of Alfred Stieglitz, and Strand visited Stieglitz's 291 gallery, where he encountered the most advanced photography and art then being shown in New York. The exposure was formative. Stieglitz recognised in Strand's early work a commitment to straight photography — unmanipulated, unretouched, unsentimental — that he believed the medium needed if it was to have a future.
Abstraction and the street
In the early 1910s Strand made a series of photographs of New York — close-up studies of bowls, shadows on a porch, the underside of a camera — that treated ordinary surfaces as abstract forms. He also photographed on the street, producing close-up portraits of New Yorkers taken with a fake lens fitted to the side of his camera, so his subjects did not know they were being photographed. Stieglitz published this work in the final two issues of Camera Work in 1916 and 1917, effectively certifying it as the direction photography needed to take. Strand had helped establish straight photography — direct, precise, without pictorial artifice — as a movement.
Film and documentary
In 1936 Strand made two films: The Plow That Broke the Plains, a documentary about the Dust Bowl directed by Pare Lorentz for the US Resettlement Administration, for which Strand served as cinematographer; and Redes (The Wave), shot in Mexico, a semi-documentary about the lives of fishermen that blended documentary observation with social argument. The same year he co-founded the Photo League in New York, a cooperative of photographers united by social commitment and mutual support. He remained associated with the organisation until its dissolution under McCarthyism in 1951.
Books and the later career
From the late 1940s Strand pursued a series of major photographic books, each dedicated to a specific place and its people. Time in New England (1950), with text by Nancy Newhall, drew on the documentary tradition he had helped establish. La France de profil (1952), Un Paese (1955, photographed in the Italian village of Luzzara with writer Cesare Zavattini), and Tir a'Mhurain (1962, on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides) applied the same approach to European communities. He also photographed in Ghana, Morocco, and Egypt. Each book was a collaboration between image and text, and each treated its subject community with the same respect that Strand had brought to his earliest street portraits.
Exile and death
The pressures of McCarthyism — Strand had been a member of various left organisations — led him to leave the United States in 1950. He settled in Orgeval, a village outside Paris, and remained in France for the rest of his life. He continued to photograph, to publish, and to exhibit; retrospective exhibitions in the 1970s confirmed his place as one of the foundational figures of 20th-century photography. He died in Orgeval on 31 March 1976.
"Photography is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossibly difficult."
