Paul Strand miscellaneous acquisitions collection

Paul Strand was born in 1890 in New York City and began studying photography at age 17 under documentary-photographer Lewis H. Hine at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. In 1908, Strand joined the Camera Club of New York and began experimenting with soft-focus lenses, gum prints and enlarged negatives. By 1912, Strand was working as a commercial photographer and continuing his photography experiments, often seeking criticism from renowned photographer Alfred Stieglitz. In 1916, Strand had his first solo exhibition at Stieglitz’s “291” gallery and was also published in Camera Work that same year.

After serving as an x-ray technician for the U.S. Army Medical Corps in the first world war, Paul Strand collaborated with artist Charles Sheeler in the production of the film Manhatta (New York the Magnificent) in 1921. Strand continued on to work in the film industry as a cameraman for a medical film company; later, when the medical film company went out of business, Strand worked as a freelance motion picture cameraman. In 1923, Strand delivered the lecture “The Art Motive in Photography” at the Clarence H. White School of Photography, which was later published in the British Journal of Photography. In 1925, Strand was in an exhibition called Seven Americans at the Anderson Galleries in New York alongside artists Charles Demuth, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz and Arthur Dove. Beginning in 1927, Strand photographed a series of extreme close-ups of plants, driftwood and rocks. From 1932 to 1934, Strand was appointed the Chief of Photography and Cinematography for the Department of Fine Arts at the Secretariat of Education for the Mexican government. During this period, Strand photographed and supervised the production of the government-sponsored film Redes, or The Wave in the U.S.

In 1935, Paul Strand traveled to Moscow where he was offered a position as a photographer for USSR in Construction. Strand ultimately declined and returned to the U.S. There, he worked with Ralph Steiner and Leo Hurwitz to produce The Plow That Broke the Plains for the U.S. Resettlement Administration. In 1937, Strand founded Frontier Films, a non-profit educational film company. Among the notable films that Frontier Films released are Heart of Spain and Native Land. In 1943, Strand worked as a cameraman on various film projects for U.S. government agencies. However, Strand returned to photography after a decade of working in film in 1944. Strand had a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York called Photographs 1915-1945 by Paul Strand.

Paul Strand moved to Europe in 1948, eventually settling in Orgeval, France in 1951. Throughout the mid-1950s, Strand worked on a series of portraits of prominent French intellectuals and close-ups of his garden in Orgeval. In 1959, Strand traveled to Egypt for two and a half months, where he photographed for Living Egypt. Strand then traveled to Morocco in 1962 to begin working on a new series of photographs that were published in Tir a' Mhurain: Outer Hebrides. During the 1960s, Strand photographed in Romania and Ghana, received a David Octavius Hill Medal from the Gesellschaft Deutscher Lichtbildner, and had a series of exhibitions held around the world. Paul Strand: A Retrospective Monograph, The Years 1915-1968 was published in 1971, with an exhibition running from 1971 to 1974. In 1973, Strand was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary member of the American Society of Magazine Photographers, and a fellow of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Strand continued to work until he died from a long-term illness on March 31, 1976 in Orgeval, France.