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.
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…
These fragments of a mural from Kuntillet Ajrud show two human heads, facing left and looking out over their city’s wall, which is flanked by towers. The mural may have been part of a military scene…
In 1993, Schechner digitally inserted himself into a historical photograph of prisoners in a newly liberated bunker at the Buchenwald concentration camp, taken in 1945 by Margaret Bourke-White. He…