Creator Bio
Paul Strand
1890–1976
Born in New York to immigrants from Germany, Paul Strand was raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was attracted to photography while studying at the Ethical Culture School under Lewis Hine. After graduation, he participated in Stieglitz’s Camera Club, published in Camera Work, and came to see himself as part of the emergent world of artistic photography. His photographic style characterized humanity in often neglected moments of urban life through street portraits, abstract cityscapes, and movement. Strand also produced films, notably his 1921 adaptation of Walt Whitman’s Mannahatta and his politically charged Frontier Films productions. After World War II he moved to Orgeval, France, and focused exclusively on photography.
Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator
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Wall Street
Wall Street is considered a seminal work in the history of photography, symbolic of a turn away from pictorialism and toward modernism. Photography would no longer seek to mimic academic painting but…
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Blind Woman
This photograph is one of a series of street photographs that Paul Strand took in 1916, using a camera outfitted with a false lens pointed away from what was being photographed. This enabled him to…
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White Fence
Around the time that Paul Strand took this photograph, he wrote an essay on photography that called for developing an original American art “without the outside influence of Paris art schools.” This…