Paul Strand

Paul Strand (October_16, 1890 – March_31, 1976) was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow Modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century. His diverse body of work, spanning six decades, covers numerous genres and subjects throughout the Americas, Europe and Africa.

Exile from McCarthyism

In June 1949 Strand left the United States to present Native Land at the International Film Festival in Marianske Lazne, Czechoslovakia. It was a departure that marked the beginning of Strand?s long exile from the prevailing climate of McCarthyism. Strand?s unwavering allegiance to Communism, fostered by his time in revolutionary Mexico, made his continuing residency in the United States untenable. The remaining twenty seven years of his life were spent in France where, despite never learning the language, he maintained an impressive creative life, assisted by his second wife, the photographer Hazel Kingsbury Strand.

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Although Strand is best known for his early abstractions, his return to still photography in this period of exile produced some of his most significant work in the form of six book ?portraits? of place: Time in New England (1950), La France de Profil (1952), Un Paese (featuring photographs of the Po River Valley in Italy, 1955), Tir a'Mhurain / Outer Hebrides (1962), Living Egypt (1969) and Ghana: an African portrait (1976). The geography of Strand?s work is itself important. The historian of art, Mike Weaver, has made the case that each of these books, in different ways, reflects Strand?s abiding commitment to the exploration of a Marxist aesthetic.

Related Topics:
Po River - Italy

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