Paul Strand

On October 16, 1890, a boy was born in New York City to a family of Bohemian immigrants. The world did not yet know that this boy would grow up to be Paul Strand, a world-renowned photographer, known best for his early abstractions.
Strand was given his first camera by his father when he was twelve years old, and at fourteen attended school at the Ethical Culture School. He was taught by documentary photographer Lewis Hine, who was working on a project involving taking photos of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island. Strand soon decided to join Hine's ventures and he was taken to the Photo-Secession Gallery on Fifth Avenue where he first encountered the works of Alfred Stieglitz, David Octavius Hill, Clarence White, and several others. This experience led him to take his photography more seriously and, he hoped, change the world.
Strand became an accomplished photographer rather quickly. He worked consistently with Alfred Stieglitz, an apostle of what he entitled Straight Photography. After Strand's photographs appeared in a 1916 issue of Camera Works, Stieglitz praised him as "without doubt the most important photographer developed in this country since Alvin Langdon Coburn." He also received much praise and publicity for both his photography and painting.
Politics were an important issue to Paul Strand. Stieglitz and a friend by the name of Alger Hiss had a strong influence on Strand and made a deep impact on his beliefs. Although he was never actually a member of the Communist party, Strand and the majority of the people he associated with were either members or prominent socialists. Stieglitz had inspired Paul to attempt to make a social impact with his photographs and film. With the onset of the Depression, Strand commited himself to production of far-left plays and socially effective documentary films. Some of these were entitled The Plow that Broke the Plains,People of the Cumberlands, and Native Land. He also published several books, including Time in New England,Mexican Portfolio, and Ghana: An African Portrait.
In 1936, Strand joined Berenice Abbot, a fellow revolutionary photographer, to establish the Photo League in New York City. The goal of this organization was to provide the radical press with photographs of union activities and political protests. The organization was audited by the House of Un-American Activities Committee during the late 1940's, like many other businesses and groups of the variety. Many members were blacklisted and Strand decided to leave the country for France. He left the United States in 1949, free of McCarthyism, to present his motion picture Native Land, an anti-fascist, pro-union film, at an international film festival in Czechoslovakia. He lived a creative life in Orgeval, France, with his second wife Hazel Kingsbury Strand until his death on March 31, 1976.
One of the many things Strand is best known for is his use of Pictoralism. Although the Pictorial photographers were a generation before Strand's time, he succeeded with this. His mentor Stieglitz, however, criticized the softness of Strand's work and emphasized a more modern approach. Within two years, Strand improved greatly with three principle themes: movement in the city, abstraction, and street portraits. He became more unique with his work when he realized that he could create movement and depth in his photographs. He slowly left behind reality and the recognizable for an incomprehensible, dynamic volume in his work. His diverse portfolio of intense, revolutionary photography encompasses six decades of different cultures and times in America, Africa, and Europe.
In photography, painting, film, and literature, Strand has been a major influence on the art world as we know it today. His impressionist photographs have an amazing ability to display the affect and tone of the world inside the picture. Strand changed photography permanently, and he has also had a large impact on society. His work has astonished many people, as well as other professional photographers.