Paul Strand

Paul Strand – Artistic photography as an unparalleled chance

Paul Strand was born Nathaniel Paul Stransky in New York on 16 October 1980, the son of Bohemian immigrants. Photography was still in its infancy at this time and had only just been recognised as its own art form. Lewis Hine, who later achieved fame primarily for his social documentary photographs, passed on the basics of the craft to the 17-year-old Paul Strand and sensitized him to the still largely unexplored artistic perspective of photography. Hines also mediated the important acquaintance with the photo pioneer Alfred Stieglitz, who played a significant part in the increasing acceptance of artistic photography with his pioneering magazine Camera Work. Stieglitz and his Photo-Secession, to which Frank Eugene and Edward Steichen also belonged, encouraged Strand to engage intensively with the contemporary art form. While he took his first tentative steps with rubber prints at the Camera Club of New York, the young man from a poor background realised ever more clearly that photography offered him a unique opportunity. 

Picasso and Cubism as starting point

Paul Strand grasped photography as a unique opportunity to break his social chains and to access the world. He soon hired himself out as a commercial photographer, but a visit to the famous Armory Show, the first exhibition of European avant-garde in New York made it clear to him that the significance of photography as art went far beyond all economic and handicraft aspects. As a result, Strand started interpreting photography as an art form, initially oriented to the much older and more established art form of painting. In his early photographic work, he surpassed the abstract principles of Cubism, whilst in imitation of Pablo Picasso, banal objects of everyday life such as fruit and crockery became a play of geometric patterns and shadows through the clever choice of perspective and lighting. He demonstrated such great talent that his delighted mentor Stieglitz bestowed him with an exhibition in the avant-garde Galerie 291 and dedicated the last two issues of Camera Work to him. 

A clear social orientation

Paul Strand registered such great success with his early work and its pioneering artistic approaches that many critics considered his later works to be inferior. This was certainly also because the leftist-oriented Paul Strand, with his socialist-tinged images, met with growing mistrust in McCarthy America. The artist escaped by travelling, leaving his homeland more and more frequently to find new motifs in Europe and Africa, unencumbered by all political conflicts in the USA. He documented the post-colonial industrialisation in Ghana and finally decided, affected by the communist persecutions, to emigrate to France. He married Hazel Kingsbury, settled in the small French municipality of Orgeval near Paris, and photographed chiefly the flowers and trees in his garden. Strand declined a conciliatory invitation from the US President Lyndon B. Johnson, citing the Vietnam War which had just begun. 

Pal Strand died in Orgeval on 31 March 1976.