Paul Strand

Paul strand (1890 – 1976)

Paul strand was born in 1890 in New York Paul Strand started work as a commercial photographer in 1912 where he experimented in soft focus lenses and enlarged negatives.

During these early years of his career he was influenced by artists including Picasso and Brancusi. In 1915 some of his work was exhibited and published in “camera work” working closely with Alfred Stieglitz.

By 1916 he had his first one man show which included images of New York and other places. In the following year (1917) he began to take close up images of machine parts.

In 1918 and 1919 he joined the Army medical corps where he worked as an x ray technician and became interested in surgery techniques. After he left the army he went to Nova Scotia where he became interested and took his first landscape photographs and close ups of rock formations.

By 1922 he purchased an Akeley motion picture camera and started to work freelance. This continued up until 1932.

During these 10 years he stayed around New York and Mexico where in his spare time he photographed machines. In fact in 1926 he photographed tree root forms and cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde.

Much of his work at this time was close up work of things such as plants, rocks and drift wood. In 1929 – 1930 he did a lot of work exploring the relationship between land and sky.

This work was undertaken both in America and Mexico, several exhibitions were staged at this time.

In 1936 at the age of 46 he married Virginia Stevens but it did not last.

During 1937 he started frontier films (and was president of the company) along with some of his friends such as Leo Hurwitz and Ralph Steiner. This work continued until 1943 when he moved to Vermont to continue his work on till photography after 10 years in the film industry.

In 1950 he moved to France to begin work on a book “Le France de profile”.

In 1951 he married for the second time to Hazel Kingsbury where France became his centre of work as well as being his home.

During the 1950’s he worked in France and Italy.

In 1954 he visited South Visit (Outer Hebrides) where he took photographs, which were eventually published in 1962 in the book “Tir a’Mhurain”

In the last few years of his life he visited Egypt in 1959 Romania and Hungary in 1960 and Ghana in 1963 at the age of 73 years many of these photographs were used in exhibitions and books. He died at the age of 86 in Orgaral in France.

Paul Strand uses black and white for all his images, what i like about his work is that everyone is in the natural state normal in there work clothes he takes the photos with the person with a solid background (wall or wood) this help with the composition of the photo, and makes the focal point being the person and not the background.

This little girl is again is stood next to wall she is not smiling and is in natural state.

This is another sort of photo he takes just a part of a person, this is taken as a close up and you can see the texture of the hands you can tell that they are an old person even though you cant see her face.

This is of men at work again wood as the background, He uses squares for the image and this frames the picture well.

The visual message is in both the picture and in what it says around her neck the rule of the thirds is present in this image.