THEIRISEXPERIENCE: Paul Strand,his legacy and the attempt

The American artist Paul Strand had a long and productive career with the camera. His pictorialist studies of the 1910s, followed by the coolly seductive machine photographs of the 1920s, like the contemporary work of Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped define the canon of early American modernism and set its premium on the elegant print.

Experimenting with Charles Sheeler, Strand then pushed further in describing the movement of the city in the short film Manhatta (1920). In the 1930s, he became seriously involved with documentary film and, from the 1940s until the end of his life, he was committed to making photographic books of the highest quality. After 1950, when he relocated to France, landscape, architecture, and portraiture (the traditional humanist genres) continued to inspire Strand to embody the spirit of his subjects in the very materials of the photographic print.

Abstraction, Twin Lakes, Connecticut, 1916

The high regard for his mature work suggests
that he succeeded in his goals, and that his standards of excellence and his constancy of subject answered very human needs in a century of radical change.

Paul Strand was born in October 16, 1890 and died on March 31 in 1976, he was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century. His diverse body of work, spanning six decades, covers numerous genres and subjects throughout the Americas, Europe, and Africa.

Manhatta, 1921. Video frame,

by Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler

Paul Strand wrote in his letter to the students of Photography in 1923 "Above all things look around you, your immediate world. If you are alive means something to you, and if you show interest enough for photography and know how to use it, you will want to photograph that meaning." And with that deep interest in the meaning of the "inmediate world", New York, Paul Strand performed in 1921 the film "Manhatta" with the collaboration of the painter Charles Sheeler.

Blind woman - 1916

In the Court of the Meiji temple - 1952

The idea of modernism and realism is around everywhere with this shots I just try to get a capture of the inmediate world, with the abstraction of different subjects, places and moments.