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.
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…
This pastoral painting is typical of the work of Charles Towne. His landscapes were not realistic depictions of actual places, but instead romantic views of idealized scenes. He cited seventeenth…
When the Allatini Mills building was built in 1898, it was considered the largest industrial building in the “Orient” (then the catch-all term for the non-European world east of Europe). The first…