Paul Strand

Paul Strand made the photographs that ended Pictorialism, and Camera Work devoted its final issue to him. He was taught at the Ethical Culture School in New York by Lewis Hine, who took the class to Stieglitz's gallery at 291; Strand came back with work of his own a few years later and Stieglitz gave him a show, then two whole issues of the magazine, the last of which closed it in 1917. The pictures were unlike anything the movement had produced: abstractions of bowls and fence posts, and street portraits made in New York with a false brass lens fitted at right angles to the real one so the subject did not know - Blind Woman of 1916 among them, which raises a question about consent that has not gone away. He made Manhatta with Charles Sheeler in 1921, one of the first avant-garde films in America, worked as a cameraman in Mexico for the government, and made documentaries with Pare Lorentz and Leo Hurwitz in the 1930s. He was a communist, was investigated in the McCarthy years, and left the United States in 1950 for a village in France, where he lived the remaining twenty-six years of his life making books about places - Italy, the Hebrides, Egypt, Ghana, Romania - photographed slowly and printed by himself. Time in New England, made with Nancy Newhall in 1950, set his photographs against New England writing. He refused to return to the United States even after the political climate changed. His negatives and prints are at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He printed in platinum and later in gelatin silver, and made his own enlargements to the end. Hine had taught him that a camera could be used as an instrument of argument. Blind Woman is in the Metropolitan Museum. Strand married three times, the first to the painter Rebecca Salsbury.

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