Paul Strand:
Voyage of Discovery
Paul STRAND (1890-1976) was an American photographer and filmmaker who helped establish photography as an art form. Strand was one of the greatest and most influential photographers of the 20th century whose early images gave rise to Modernism in Photography. His images have defined the way fine art and documentary photography is understood and practiced today.
Paul Strand was born Nathaniel Paul Stransky on October 16, 1890, in New York. When Paul was 12 years old, his father gave him a camera as a present.
Snow, Backyards, New York, 1915
Vintage Photogravure
5 3/16 x 6 ¾ inches
From Camera Work 48, 1916
“When I went to the Ethical Culture School… Lewis Hine [had] an extracurricular class in photography and I was keen to join it… The one thing that was significant for me was the day [in 1907] that he took us all down to a place called the Photo-Secession Gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue, where there was an exhibition of photographs. I walked out of that place that day feeling, This is what I want to do, this is what I would like to do in my life”
- Paul Strand
Man in a Derby, New York, 1916
Vintage Photogravure
8 7/8 x 6 11/16 inches,
from Camera Work 49/50 1917
“For concentrated power, formal coherence, and human sensitivity, the extraordinary pictures he made in and around New York City in 1916 have never been bettered.”
- Maria Morris Hambourg, “Paul Strand: Circa 1916” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Among Strand’s earlier avant-garde gestures was his practice of photographing un-staged portraits of people on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Strand used a false lens attached to the side of his medium format camera in order to capture the moment without anyone aware that they were being photographed. In that way, his camera faced straight ahead while the lens actually captured the scene off to the side.
Sandwich Man, New York, 1916
Vintage Photogravure
8 7/8 x 6 11/16 inches
From Camera Work 49/50, 1917
The nature of street photography, as we think of it today, wouldn't develop until the advent of the handheld 35mm camera, such as the Leica. Portraiture to this point had been largely relegated to the stately confines of the studio.
In 1916 Alfred Stieglitz centered an entire show around Strand’s Modernist breakthrough at his international gallery, 291. Stieglitz praised Strand’s work as “the direct expression of today.”
“I used to go and see [Alfred] Stieglitz about once every two years… in 1915 I put together a group of work… to show to Steiglitz for criticism… He was very enthusiastic and said: “You’ve done something new for photography and I want to show these… ‘291’ is your place too, you belong here.”
Blind Woman is one of Strand’s most renowned images. The woman, a peddler, is wearing a metal plate around her neck that identifies her disability and lists her license number (a requirement for beggars during the Progressive Era, 1890s–1920s). As a woman, a peddler and a blind individual, the subject is buried under three levels of social invisibility. In Strand’s photograph, however, she is immortalized and lent credence as well as visibility This image was subsequently lauded for its seamless merging of social humanism with modernist sensibility.
“Under the El, New York, 1915” represents one of the earliest examples of Modernist Photography in that it fully embraces photographic vision to produce abstraction. Strand's work is almost entirely responsible for the rise of the Modernist movement in Photography, demonstrated in an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art titled "Paul Strand: Circa 1916."
”… there is something unsettling, curious, and demanding about these pictures, something that is exciting and moving without being in the least sentimental. It is as if Strand has combined various aspects of modernity with an overlay of timelessness, like a digest of Cezanne, Picasso, and Rembrandt all at once.”
Phillippe de Montebello, Director, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from the Forward “Paul Strand: Circa 1916”
Under the El, New York, 1915
Toned and Waxed Gelatin Silver Print on Cykora Paper
Neg Date: 1915, Print Date: 1944-45
12 11/16 x 9 15/16 inches
Flush mounted back to back to a processed piece of the same photographic paper.
Signed, titled and dated by Hazel Strand on mount verso.
Strand’s unflinching studies of the people, architecture, and street scenes of New York City were shockingly new subjects for fine art. Through his extraordinary command of formal composition, Strand brought elegance to the ordinary.
Lathe #2, New York, 1922
Gelatin Silver Print, printed circa 1945
9 5/8 x 7 5/8 inches
Flush-mounted to board.
Signed, titled and dated by Paul Strand on the print verso.
During the first half of the 1920s, Strand created a remarkable group of precisionist photographs, close-up portraits of the Akeley Motion Picture Camera, machine gears, and in this picture, the lathe in the Akeley machine shop. This coincided with the height of Strand’s fascination with the machine aesthetic and his enthusiasm for the “absolute unqualified objectivity” of photography in what he considered to be its purest state. He later wrote, “[I] tried to photograph the power and marvelous precision which the very functional forms, surfaces, and lines of a machine reflect.”
From 1925 to 1928 Paul Strand made numerous trips to Georgetown Island, Maine, to make photographs and visit his friend, the sculptor Gaston Lachaise (1882-1935). During this time Strand was drawn to elements of nature—tree trunks, pieces of driftwood, and plants. He approached these organic forms much in the same way he had treated the Cubist-inspired still lifes or machine-age subjects. He filled the entire ground glass with close-up views, allowing for minimum depth of field, and brought the subject to the surface of the print, literally exploiting the two-dimensional quality of the photograph itself. But there was a marked shift in his work. He was now rejecting the urban landscape and material objects—products of industrialization—and turning to a more fundamental subject: nature.
Mullein, Maine, 1928
Vintage Gelatin Silver Print
9 5/8 x 7 5/8 inches
Flush-mounted back to back with another Strand photograph of a sculpture by Gaston Lachaise
Strand's nature studies from the 1920s are of organic objects made up of light and dark tones, which he referred to as "chiaroscuro." During this time Strand was influenced by Clive Bell (1881-1964), the British art critic and philosopher of art, who, in his 1914 publication Art, advocated the idea of "significant form," which was when "lines and colour combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions."
In this example, Strand focused on the subject, at times with a near microscopic zeal, attempting to record the very fiber of its existence. He was beginning to realize that these concentrated studies could, when viewed collectively, define an area, a region, or a country. In his approach to documenting the natural landscape of Georgetown Island, Strand was anticipating a working method he would apply to later pictures in France, Italy, and Scotland, where his focus was on the people who defined these regions.”
(Excerpt from Paul Strand, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum by Anne M. Lyden (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), 34. ©2005, J. Paul Getty Trust.)
Corea and Lobster Pots, Maine, 1945
Vintage Gelatin Silver Print
9 5/8 x 7 5/8 inches
Flush-mounted to board, signed, titled and dated on behalf of Paul Strand by Hazel Strand on the print verso.
Paul Strand traveled to New Mexico in the early 1930s since his wife Rebecca was spending time with the painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) at her studio near Santa Fe.
St. Francis Church, Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico, 1931
Gelatin Silver Print, printed in the late 1950’s
8 7/8 x 11 1/8 inches
Signed on behalf of Paul Strand by Hazel Strand on the print verso.
Strand was particularly drawn to the 18th-century church of San Francisco de Assisi. Completed in 1755, the church became famous in the twentieth century as an icon of pure form. A popular subject for many artists over the years, including Georgia O'Keeffe, the site was photographed numerous times by Paul Strand. In this view the monumental structure of the adobe building is barely contained within the composition. The corners of the church are carefully placed near the image’s edges so that the structure seems to push out of the frame.
During this time, Strand achieved a new understanding of landscape, revealing a deep awareness of what he called “the spirit of place.”
After World War II, unhappy with the political situation in the United States, Strand moved to France and worked throughout Europe. The remaining years of his life were spent in Orgeval, France, where, despite never learning the language, he maintained an impressive, creative life, assisted by his third wife, fellow photographer Hazel Kingsbury Strand.
L’Armancon, Cuzy, Yonne, Burgundy, France, 1951
Vintage Gelatin Silver Print
5 7/8 x 4 5/8 inches
Flush-mounted to board.
Signed by Paul Strand on the print verso.
“His approach is unlike that of any other major photographer working today. He takes his time. He avoids the picturesque, the famous, the ephemeral and the newsworthy; he goes down the back ways to find the humble and the common. He goes and looks, then comes away and lets what he has seen sink in. Then he goes back. Maybe this time, maybe the next, whenever he feels ready, he takes along his 8 x 10 with the bellows lens hood and the 3x7 Graflex masked down to the squarer proportion of 5 x 6V2. He is relentless; he will not stop until he has seen on the ground glass the ultimate image of a place or a person that is in him to see. Nor, later, will he stop before he has made from that image the richest print it is in him to make. He is not a technician; he prefers the simplest means. But he will resort to any technique, whether banal as a snapshot or complex beyond most photographers' endurance, to get what he wants.
His roots are deep in the oldest and greatest tradition in photography; he judges by the severe and vital canons of all art. The concepts he works for he has made his own.”
(“Paul Strand: Letters from France and Italy, Aperture Vol 2, No. 2, 1953)
Houses, Locmariaquer, Finistère, Brittany, France, 1950
Vintage Gelatin Silver Print
9 5/8 x 7 5/8 inches
Flush-mounted to board.
Signed by Paul Strand on the print verso.
“The Artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.”
- Paul Strand
To view the work of Paul Strand is an exercise in slowing down time and space, to meditate on the moment captured, and to savor the meticulous details of his carefully crafted photographic prints.
Balcony and Windows, Gaeta, Italy, 1952
Vintage gelatin silver print
9 ½ x 7 5/8 inches
Flush-mounted to board.
Signed and titled on behalf of Paul Strand by Hazel Strand on the print verso.
Strand wanted to show how time and history had shaped the present moment of each place he photographed.
In 1954 Paul Strand and his wife Hazel spent three months traversing the rugged island of South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland. Strand was inspired to travel to the Hebrides after hearing a radio programme on Gaelic folksongs and his work there resulted in the book Tir a'Mhurain. The book title is taken from a traditional Gaelic song “Tìr a’ mhurain, tìr an eórna” (land of bent grass, land of barley) that laments the plight of emigrants, longing to return to Uist, the treeless island, where strong winds bend the beach grass. This collection of photographs capture a moment in time of rural island community life and the wild open landscape in which they lived.
Ewan MacLeod, South Uist, Hebrides, 1954
Vintage Gelatin Silver Print
5 7/8 x 4 5/8 inches
Flush-mounted to board.
Signed, titled and dated on behalf of Paul Strand by Hazel Strand on the print verso.
Archie MacDonald, South Uist, Hebrides, 1954
Vintage Gelatin Silver Print
5 7/8 x 4 9/16 inches
Flush-mounted to board.
Signed, titled and dated on behalf of Paul Strand by Hazel Strand on the print verso.
“I think of myself fundamentally as an explorer who has spent his life on a long voyage of discovery.”
- Paul Strand
“The history of modern art shows that America offered a fertile environment for some of the most important photographic pioneers of the twentieth century. It was perhaps Paul Strand who carved out a most unique position amongst them. Strand is often discussed as the architect of the so-called Straight Photography; a pure photographic style that utilized large format cameras to record, and bring new perspectives to ordinary or previously ignored subjects in the name of fine art. Strand's 'Straight' aesthetic proved so persuasive in fact that it was adopted by other luminaries in the photographic circle and the 'Straight' ideal formed part of the clarion call for the famous f/64 Group who shared similar ideals with Strand, as did a number of other Straight photographers in the next several decades.”
(TheArtStory.org)