Paul Strand, the straight photograph
« American photographer (1890-1976), the link between Stieglitz and modern documentary. »
A student of Lewis Hine at the Ethical Culture School, introduced by Stieglitz in the final issue of Camera Work in 1917, Paul Strand broke early with pictorialism. Blind Woman, New York (1916) — taken with a prism viewfinder so as not to be seen — pulled photography into modernity.
In the 1930s he turned to documentary film (The Plow That Broke the Plains, 1936) before returning to photography in a new form: the book. Time in New England (1950), Un Paese (Italy, 1955), Tir a'Mhurain (Hebrides, 1962) invented the "community portrait book."
He left the United States in 1950, fleeing McCarthyism. Settled in Orgeval near Paris, he died there in 1976. His influence on auteur documentary — Frank, Salgado, Davidson — is immense, and his trajectory from studio to street to book traces a typical 20th-century arc.