Paul Strand

Paul Strand (1890-1976), American photographer and documentary filmmaker, known for his straightforward realism. Strand’s semiabstract studies of ordinary objects such as kitchen bowls and mechanical tools helped launch a new, more modern aesthetic in American photography. Known as straight photography, this sharply focused style emphasized forms and composition rather than subject matter (see History of Photography).

Strand was born in New York City, where he attended the progressive Ethical Culture School. One of his teachers was social documentary photographer Lewis Hine, whose commitment to social justice influenced Strand’s work. Hine introduced Strand to American photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz.

Following his high school graduation in 1909, Strand established a commercial photography studio. He went often to Stieglitz’s gallery, where he studied the works of progressive photographers and modern European painters such as Pablo Picasso and Paul Cézanne. When Strand showed his work to Stieglitz in 1915, the two began an intense artistic relationship. Strand’s photographs evolved from the then-fashionable pictorialist style—which was marked by softly focused prints, often manipulated in the darkroom to resemble traditional paintings—to a sharply focused style that conveyed meaning through the artist’s choice of viewpoint and lighting. Stieglitz exhibited Strand’s photographs in a solo show in 1916 and then devoted two issues of his influential magazine Camera Work to Strand.

After serving in the United States Army Medical Corps in 1918 and 1919, Strand turned to freelance work as a motion-picture camera operator. In documentary filmmaking, Strand found an outlet that combined his artistic impulses with his passionate concern for social justice. He worked with American painter and photographer Charles Sheeler on the documentary film Manhattan (1920), which exposed social injustices brought about by the new machine age. For the next 20 years Strand worked on numerous documentary films, including The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), a landmark documentary directed by Pare Lorenz.

The 1930s were a time of intense artistic production and political activism for Strand. He traveled to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1935, where he met filmmaker Sergey Eisenstein and other avant-garde artists. In 1940 Strand published the Mexican Portfolio, a collection of prints from trips he had made to Mexico in 1932 and 1933. He established Frontier Films, a nonprofit collective film production company, in 1937. Strand served as the group’s president until 1942, and with Leo Hurwitz, he codirected its most important film, Native Land (1942), which depicted corporate-funded union busting.

By 1950 Strand’s associations with left-wing political groups put him in conflict with the growing anticommunist sentiment in the United States. Fearing persecution from the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he fled to Paris, France, and never returned to live in the United States.