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4 unusual facts about Paul Strand


Paul Strand

Although he was never officially a member of the Communist Party, many of Strand’s collaborators were either Party members (James Aldridge; Cesare Zavattini) or were prominent socialist writers and activists (Basil Davidson).

The remaining 27 years of his life were spent in Orgeval, France where, despite never learning the language, he maintained an impressive creative life, assisted by his third wife, fellow photographer Hazel Kingsbury Strand.

Rien que les heures

Other noted examples of the genre include Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand's Manhatta (1921), Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927), Andre Sauvage's Etudes sur Paris (1928), and Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera (1929)

Straight photography

Paul Strand's 1917 characterization of his work as "absolute unqualified objectivity" described a change in the meaning of the term.


Grapestake Gallery in San Francisco

The gallery opened with an Ansel Adams retrospective and later exhibited artists such as Harry Callahan, Joel Meyerowitz, Paul Strand, William Eggleston, Richard Misrach, Berenice Abbott, Imogen Cunningham, Judy Dater, Lewis baltz and Jerry Uelsmann.

The West Coast Photographic Movement

Notable artists and photographers included: Dody Weston Thompson, Ansel Adams, Minor White, Charis Wilson (second wife of Edward Weston and the famous model of his nude photographic work), Paul Strand, Dorothea Lange, Wynn Bullock, Don Ross, Ruth Bernhard, Willard Van Dyke, Nata Piaskowski, Beaumont Newhall and Nancy Newhall, and artists Georgia O'Keeffe, Morris Graves and Jean Charlot and his wife Zohmah Charlot.

Under the Dark Cloth

It is the result of an invitation by the Department of Photography of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to write a suite of songs inspired by the work of pioneering photographers Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen.


see also

Ben Maddow

Under the pseudonym of David Wolff, Maddow co-wrote the screenplay to the Paul Strand–Leo Hurwitz documentary landmark, Native Land (1942).

Marion Post Wolcott

When she found that the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin kept sending her to do "ladies' stories," Ralph Steiner took her portfolio to show Roy Stryker, head of the Farm Security Administration, and Paul Strand wrote a letter of recommendation.