Paul Strand was born in New York City. As a teenager, he was a student of renowned documentary photographer Lewis Hine at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. A visit to Gallery 291 (owned by Alfred Stieglitz) proved to be a strong influence on Strand, who began to take photographs of his own. He experimented with abstraction but also used his camera as a means to promote social reform. Alfred Stieglitz praised these early efforts and featured Strand's work in his gallery and in his magazine Camera Work. In the early 1920s, Strand began to work in motion pictures as well as still photography. In June 1949, Strand left the United States to present a film in Czechoslovakia, an event which marked the beginning of his self-imposed exile overseas due to the prevailing climate of McCarthyism in America. He settled in Orgeval, France and in the ensuing years photographed extensively, and also produced six book "portraits" of places: Time in New England (1950), La France de Profil (1952), Un Paese (1955), Tir a'Mhurain / Outer Hebrides (1962), Living Egypt (1969) and Ghana: An African Portrait (1976). Strand died in 1976.
Source Robert Mann Gallery
Publisher : Publisher : Metropolitan Museum of Art
2010 | 180 pages
Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), Edward Steichen (1879–1973), and Paul Strand (1890–1976) are among the most famous photographers of the 20th century. This handsome volume showcases for the first time the Metropolitan Museum’s extraordinarily rich holdings of works by these diverse and groundbreaking masters.
A passionate advocate for photography and modern art promoted through his “Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession” (also known as “291”) and his journal Camera Work, Stieglitz was also a photographer of supreme accomplishment. Featured works by Stieglitz include portraits, landscapes, city views, and cloud studies, along with photographs from his composite portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe (selected by O’Keeffe herself for the Museum). Steichen—perhaps best known as a fashion photographer, celebrity portraitist, and MoMA curator—was Stieglitz’s man in Paris, gallery collaborator, and most talented exemplar of Photo-Secessionist photography. His three large variant prints of The Flatiron and his moonlit photographs of Rodin’s Balzac are highlighted here. Marking a pivotal moment in the course of photography, the final double issue of Camera Work (1915–17) was devoted to the young Paul Strand, whose photographs from 1915 and 1916 treated three principal themes—movement in the city, abstractions, and street portraits—and pioneered a shift from the soft-focus Pictorialist aesthetic to the straight approach and graphic power of an emerging modernism. Represented are Strand’s rare large platinum prints—most of them unique exhibition prints of images popularly known only as Camera Work photogravures.
The rarely exhibited photographs gathered in Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand are among the crown jewels of the Metropolitan’s collection.
"Paul Strand in Mexico" tells the story of the photographer's journeys through Mexico in the early 1930s. In search of a fresh start, Strand traveled to Mexico City in late 1932 at the invitation of Carlos Chavez, the eminent Mexican composer and conductor. The work he created during this key period reflects a time of intense productivity, creative renewal, and the evolution of Strand's foundational idea of the "collective portrait," in which he depicted a region through photographs of individuals, still lifes and studies of architecture and religious subjects. The first publication to chronicle this pivotal time in Strand's career (1932-34), "Paul Strand in Mexico "demonstrates how, through his photographic studies and work in film, Strand deepened his involvement with Mexican art, society, and revolutionary politics. Shedding new light on this little-known chapter of Strand's life, a scholarly analysis by James Krippner (Associate Professor of History at Haverford College, Pennsylvania) brings together primary research from distinguished archives and institutions in both Mexico and the United States, and Mexican photo-historian Alfonso Morales contributes an essay contextualizing this remarkable body of work within the canon of Mexican photography and film of the 1930s. Additionally, the appendix serves as the catalogue raisonné of Strand's entire photographic output in Mexico. The culmination of Strand's time in Mexico was his collaboration with Emilio Gomez Muriel and Academy Award-winning director Fred Zinnemann on the groundbreaking film, "Redes" ("The Wave") (1936). A remastered DVD version of the film is included with this essential volume.
Paul Strand (1890-1976) is one of the great photographers of the twentieth century. As a youth, he studied under Lewis Hine at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, going on to draw acclaim from such illustrious sources as Alfred Stieglitz. After World War II, Strand traveled around the world--from New England to Ghana to France to the Outer Hebrides--to photograph, and in the process created a dynamic and significant body of work.
Paul Strand: Sixty Years of Photographs, a long-unavailable Aperture classic, is one of the most comprehensive surveys of the power and force of a major photographic figure of our time. Before his death in 1976 at age eighty-five, Strand combed his photographic prints and his many books with an eye to the completion of this volume. Seen here is the summation of a lifework, from the first abstract photographs to the series of plant photographs taken in the last years of his life. Also included is a rarely examined series of filmsUbrilliant, unprecedented documentaries that foreshadowed Italian neo-realism and the new cinema of the post-war years. The re-release of this volume, which features the famous biographical profile by Calvin Tomkins and excerpts from Strand's correspondence, interviews, and other documents, makes one of photography's major artists newly accessible.
Paul Strand was more than a great artist: he discovered that photography had the potential to be the most dynamic medium of the twentieth century. Purity, elegance, and passion are the hallmarks of Strand's imagery. This inaugural volume of Aperture's Masters of Photography series presents 41 of Strand's greatest photographs, drawn from a career that spanned six decades. Included are his earliest experimental efforts, created from 1915 to 1917, which Alfred Stieglitz declared had begun to redefine the medium. Subsequent photographs reveal the artist's impeccable vision in locales as diverse as New England and the Outer Hebrides, France and Ghana. During Strand's last years, he concentrated on still lifes and the poignant beauty of his own garden at Orgeval, France.
In an introductory essay, Mark Haworth-Booth, Curator of Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, provides an overview of the artist's life and his enduring contribution to photography.
Paul Brouns is a Dutch photographer who found his voice by capturing architecture. The urban landscape is his ideal playground for apprehending rhythm, color and geometrical elements. He is the winner of AAP Magazine 14 "Colors" with his project 'Urban Tapestries'. We asked him a few questions about his life and work.
Referred to as someone who "captures the souls of his models", (Wanderlust Travel Magazine, 2018) Réhahn is more than just a man behind a camera. Behind each click is a story. Whether the photograph shows a child with startling blue eyes, a woman pulling a needle through indigo fabric or a man walking alone down a brightly painted street, these are more than just images to Réhahn. They are the culmination of an experience. The stories of his subjects as well as his passion to learn more about their culture, diversity and changing traditions are what drives Réhahn's work.
Craig Varjabedian's photographs of the American West illuminate his profound connection with the region and its people. His finely detailed images shine with an authenticity that reveals the ties between identity, place, and the act of perceiving. For Varjabedian, photography is a receptive process driven by openness to the revelation each subject offers, rather than by the desire to manipulate form or to catalog detail. He achieves this vision by capturing and suspending on film those decisive moments in which the elements and the spirit of a moment come together
Jacopo Maria Della Valle is an Italian travel photographer who fell in love with photography at young age thanks to the influence of his father. Since then he has travelled to Europe, the USA, Cuba, Morocco and all over Asia. He is the winner of AAP Magazine 12 B&W with his project Bull Jumping. We asked him a few questions about his life and work.
Giedo van der Zwan is a street photographer, writer and publisher from the Netherlands. He started working on a long-term project 'Pier to Pier' in 2017 and published his book in June 2018. He is the winner of AAP Magazine 8 Street. We asked him a few questions about his life and work.
Eli Klein Gallery has an international reputation as one of the foremost galleries specializing in contemporary Chinese art and continues to advance the careers of its represented artists and hundreds of other Chinese artists with whom it has collaborated. The Gallery has been instrumental in the loan of artworks by Chinese artists to over 100 museum exhibitions throughout the world. It has published 40 books/catalogues and organized more than 75 exhibitions of Chinese contemporary art at our prestigious venues in New York City.
Cayetano González is a talented Spanish photographer and cinematographer who found his calling when his grandfather lend him his Leica. Since then he has directed commercials and shot several covers of major magazines. His work is influenced by the painters he admires like Sorolla, Velázquez, Rembrandt and Delacroix.
Mauro De Bettio is an Italian photographer who lives in Spain. His pictures are a visual story able to highlight unseen or ignored realities. A vital tool that can help bring about social changes. He is the winner of AAP Magazine 11 Travels. We asked him a few questions about his life and work.
Stéphane Lavoué, is a French portrait photographer born in Mulhouse in 1976. He lives and works between Brittany and Paris. He is the winner of the Niépce Prize 2018. We asked him a few questions about his life and work.
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