Biography of Paul Strand

Photographer Paul Strand (1890-1976) was Stieglitz’s only protégé. As did O’Keeffe, Stand combined modernist abstraction with soil-and-spirit nationalism.
In a 1917 series of gritty portraits of New York city street people, he savagely condemned urbanism and immigration, favoring instead a vision of settled semi-rural life, the “middle landscape” celebrated by 19th century painters Thomas Cole and Frederick Church. Strand elaborated on this theme in the 1920s and 1930s producing intimate studies of native New England plants and surveys of several settlements from Nova Scotia to New Mexico. This work indicates his fascination with ethnography which he revealed in his commercial film work of sporting events and community development projects in the 1920s. Turning to radical politics, he worked with Mexican Marxists from 1932 to 1934 on a film extolling peasant fishermen in Vera Cruz. He later founded the Frontier Films in 1936 and produced a series of films supporting the U.S. labor movement and Spanish republicans. He returned to still photography and ethnography with The time in New England (1950), a visual representation of essential American values he saw represented in the history of rural New England. All his subsequent work was a reprise of these themes present in his 1917 series. Among the people that Strand associated with are: Harold Clurman, Rebecca Salsbury James, Pare Lorentz, Dorothy Norman, Robert O’Flaherty, Georgia O’Keeffe, Ralph Steiner, Alfred Stieglitz.
 

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