Paul Strand
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Paul Strand (October_16, 1890 – March_31, 1976) was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow Modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century. His diverse body of work, spanning six decades, covers numerous genres and subjects throughout the Americas, Europe and Africa.
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Early Modernism
Image:StrandWallStreet.jpgBorn in New York City to Bohemian parents, Strand was a student of renowned documentary photographer Lewis Hine at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in his late teens. It was while on a fieldtrip in this class that Strand first visited the 291 art gallery – operated by Stieglitz and Edward Steichen – where exhibitions of work by forward-thinking Modernist photographers and painters would convince Strand to take his photographic hobby more seriously. Stieglitz would later promote Strand's work both in the 291 itself and in his photography publication Camera Work. Some of this early work experimented with formal abstractions, while other works showed his interest in using the camera as a tool for social reform (no doubt inspired by Hine).
Film-making
Over the next few decades Strand got into motion pictures as well as still photography. His first film project was Manhatta, (also known as New York the Magnificent) a silent film showing the day-to-day life of New York City made with painter/photographer Charles Sheeler. Other films he was involved with included Redes, (released in the US as The Wave) a film commissioned by the Mexican government in 1936 and the pro-union, anti-fascist Native Land released in 1942. Strand was closely involved with Frontier Films, one of more than twenty organizations which were branded as ‘subversive’ and ‘un-American’ by the US Attorney General.
France
In June 1949, Strand left the United States to present Native Land at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in Czechoslovakia. It was a departure that marked the beginning of Strand’s long exile from the prevailing climate of McCarthyism in the United States. Strand’s unwavering allegiance to Communism, fostered by his time in revolutionary Mexico, made his continuing residency in the United States untenable. The remaining 27 years of his life were spent in Orgeval, France where, despite never learning the language, he maintained an impressive creative life, assisted by his second wife, fellow photographer Hazel Kingsbury Strand.
Although Strand is best known for his early abstractions, his return to still photography in this period produced some of his most significant work in the form of six book ‘portraits’ of place: Time in New England (1950), La France de Profil (1952), Un Paese (featuring photographs of the Po River Valley in Italy, 1955), Tir a'Mhurain / Outer Hebrides (1962), Living Egypt (1969) and Ghana: an African portrait (1976).
Strand’s politics
Whether or not he carried a Party card, Paul Strand was clearly embedded in Communist networks in both America and Europe. The timing of Strand’s departure is coincident with the first libel trial of his friend Alger Hiss, with whom he maintained a close correspondence until his death. In Europe, many of Strand’s collaborators were either Party members (James Aldridge; Cesare Zavatinni) or were prominent socialist writers and activists (Basil Davidson). Many of his close friends were also well-known Communists (the lawyer D. N. Pritt; the film director Joseph Losey; the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid; the actor Alex McCrindle).
Strand also insisted that his books should be printed in Leipzig, East Germany, even if this meant that they were initially prohibited from the American market on account of their Communist provenance. De-classified intelligence files, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and now lodged at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, reveal that Strand’s movements around Europe were closely monitored by the security services. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the timing of Strand’s visit to South Uist in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides in 1954, at precisely the moment when the island became a new frontier in the Cold War as the test site for America and Britain’s first guided nuclear weapon, the Corporal missile.
References
- Paul Strand: Aperture Masters of Photography. Hong Kong: Aperture. ISBN 0-89381-077-0.
- Rosenblum, Naomi. A World History of Photography (3rd ed.). New York: Abbeville Press. ISBN 0-7892-0028-7.
- Maren Stange, Paul Strand: essays on his life and work, New York: Aperture 1991.
- Mike Weaver, ‘Paul Strand: Native Land’, The Archive 27 (Tucson, Arizona: Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, 1990) 5-15.
- Fraser MacDonald, 'Paul Strand and the Atlanticist Cold War' History of Photography 28.4 (2004) 356-373 available for download as pdf.