STRAND, PAUL

born Oct. 16, 1890, New York City died March 31, 1976, near Paris photographer whose works contributed to the emphasis on abstract and objective qualities in 20th-century U.S. photography. When he was 17 years old, Strand began to study photography with Lewis W. Hine, later noted for his photographs of industrial workers and immigrants. At Hine's urging, Strand began to frequent the galleries at 291 in New York, where he met Alfred Stieglitz, the leader of the Photo-Secession Group and was influenced also by the avant-garde paintings of Picasso, Czanne, and Braque. Their works led him to emphasize abstract form and pattern in his photographs, such as Shadow Pattern, New York and Wall Street (both 1915). In one of the boldest photographs of the period, White Fence (1916), Strand deliberately destroyed perspective to build a powerful composition from tonal planes and rhythmic pattern. Strand at this time did not attempt to emulate painting by manipulating his negatives or his prints, common practices of the Photo-Secessionists. Instead, he relied on strictly photographic methods, realizing that the camera's objectivity is at once its limitation and its chief asset. Strand's objective photographs of urban subjects were published by Stieglitz in his magazine Camera Work. Strand rejected soft-focus pictorialism in favour of the minute detail and rich, subtle tonal range afforded by the use of large-format cameras. The purity and directness of Strand's depictions of natural forms and architecture presaged the work of other American photographers seeking to express abstract formal values through the unadorned photographic image. After serving in World War I, Strand collaborated with the painter and photographer Charles Sheeler on the documentary film Mannahatta. While working as a free-lance motion picture cameraman, he devoted his free time to still photography, revealing the beauty of natural forms in Colorado (1926) and Maine (192728). In his photographs of the Gasp Peninsula in Quebec (1929) and of New Mexico (1930), he achieved a new understanding of landscape, revealing a deep awareness of what he called the spirit of place. Appointed chief photographer and cinematographer by the Mexican government in 1933, he made the motion picture Redes (The Wave) about Mexican fishermen. Returning to the United States, Strand was a cameraman for the director Pare Lorentz on the government-sponsored documentary film The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936). In 1937 Strand formed Frontier Films to make documentaries. Of the nonprofit company's seven films, Strand photographed only Native Land (1942). After World War II his work appeared mainly in photographic books: Time in New England (with Nancy Newhall; 1950), La France de profil (with Claude Roy; 1952; France in Profile), Un Paese (1954), and Tir A'Mhurain, Outer Hebrides (1962).