Paul Strand

Paul Strand's decisive break came in part from his first visit to Gallery 291 in 1907, where Lewis Hine introduced him to modern painting. Cezanne's reduction of nature to spheres, cylinders, and cones, and the Cubist fragmentation of form by Picasso and Braque, suggested to Strand that geometry already lay hidden within the modern world^*1. The rhythm of fence slats, the parallelogram of a window shadow on the floor, the ellipse of a bowl on a terrace: all of these could be revealed through sharp focus and high contrast, without borrowing painterly brushwork. From that point of view, pictorialist soft focus and manipulation only obscured the structural clarity that photography was uniquely able to show. Straight photography, with no darkroom theatrics and no imitation of painting, became the method equal to this discovery^*1. By around 1912 he had turned away from pictorialism and moved toward bold geometry and crisp focus. Works such as White Fence and Bowl, New York from 1916 made pure relationships of shape and viewpoint their subject, while Blind Woman from the same year used a hidden prism lens to produce one of the earliest frontal street portraits of someone unaware of the camera^*2. Published in the final double issue of Camera Work in 1917, these photographs were praised as the most direct and candid work yet to appear in photography. Strand's own phrase about a pure and intelligent use of the camera, related to painting yet never trespassing on it, later became a succinct declaration of straight photography^*3. During World War I he served as an X-ray technician, and afterward collaborated with Charles Sheeler on the film Manhatta (1921). In the 1930s he worked in Mexico, directing film projects tied to agrarian reform, and later continued to photograph farmers and ordinary people in New Mexico, New England, France, Italy, and Ghana under the long, consistent theme of human dignity across time and place^*4. His work of 1916-17 is now regarded as a decisive historical turning point: if Stieglitz led the break with pictorialism, Strand demonstrated exactly how that break could be made^*5.