Paul Strand documented people, work, culture and artifacts of life by way of photography. His work came during a revitalization period for art. He redefined the photographic medium by creating work that reflected the time(s) and documented history.
“The documentary photographer aims his camera at the real world to record truthfulness. At the same time, he must strive for form, to devise effective ways of organizing and using the material. For content and form are interrelated. The problems presented by content and form must be so developed that the result is fundamentally true to the realities of life as we know it. The chief problem is to find a form that adequately represents the reality.” – Paul Strand
Paul Strand (born in New York, 1890; died in Orgeval, France, 1976) was one of the great photographers of the twentieth century. He studied under Lewis Hine, going on to be celebrated by Alfred Stieglitz and David Alfaro Siqueiros. After World War II, Strand traveled around the world—from New England to Ghana, France to the Outer Hebrides—to photograph. Influenced by modern painting and sculpture in 1916 Strand began to deviate from his contemporaries and attempted to make artistic photography without manipulation of camera or the photo’s development. Geometric shapes, pattern, space, light and shadow along with framing force the onlooker into taking their time to contemplate what they are seeing. This was part of what made Strand stand out and become one of the masters of the photographic medium.
When referring to Paul Strand many will mention his “Blind” photo (1916) or “Wall Street” (1915) but I am most captivated by his “Porch Shadows” (1916). Here he has the viewer pause and refers to geometric form. The image is full of light and shadow creating compositional diagonals. Abstraction through fragmentation is created by framed content and harmony. The sunlight used here warms the image and yet the structure of the image is very staunch in its placing.
Strand wrote that true modernists should avoid all “tricks of process or manipulation” to celebrate photography’s inherent qualities as art.
