Paul Strand

Paul Strand was born Nathaniel Paul Stransky in New York City on October 16, 1890, to Bohemian parents Jacob and Matilda Stransky. His father gave him a camera when he turned twelve. As a teenager, Strand studied under documentary photographer Lewis Hine at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. During a class field trip, he visited the 291 art gallery run by Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, where modernist photography and painting exhibitions inspired him to take his hobby more seriously. Stieglitz later showcased Strand’s work at the 291 gallery, in the publication *Camera Work*, and at the Hieninglatzing studio. Early pieces like *Wall Street* played with formal abstraction, influencing artists such as Edward Hopper. Other photographs reflected Strand’s interest in social reform. For portraits, he sometimes attached a fake brass lens to the side of his camera while using a real working lens hidden under his arm, meaning subjects often did not realize they were being photographed—a technique that drew criticism.

In 1936, Strand helped launch the Photo League, a cooperative of photographers united around social and creative goals. He and Elizabeth McCausland were especially active in the League, with Strand acting as an elder statesman. Both were left-leaning, and Strand was more than sympathetic to Marxist ideas. Together with Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall, they contributed to the League’s publication *Photo News*.

Over the following decades, Strand worked in both still photography and film. His first movie, *Manhatta* (1921), made with painter and photographer Charles Sheeler, was a silent film depicting daily life in New York City; it included a shot similar to his 1915 photograph *Wall Street*. From 1932 to 1935, he lived in Mexico and made *Redes* (1936), commissioned by the Mexican government and released in the U.S. as *The Wave*. He also worked on the documentary *The Plow That Broke the Plains* (1936) and the pro-union, anti-fascist film *Native Land* (1942). Between 1933 and 1952, Strand lacked his own darkroom and used those belonging to others.

In December 1947, the Photo League was placed on the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations. In 1948, CBS hired Strand to take a photo for an advertisement titled “It is Now Tomorrow,” showing television antennas atop New York City. On January 17, 1949, Strand signed a statement supporting Communist Party leaders on trial under the Smith Act, alongside figures like Lester Cole, W. E. B. Du Bois, Howard Fast, and Muriel Rukeyser.

In June 1949, Strand left the U.S. to present *Native Land* at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in Czechoslovakia. He spent the remaining 27 years of his life in Orgeval, France, where—despite never learning the language—he maintained a productive creative life with help from his third wife, photographer Hazel Kingsbury Strand. Although best known for his early abstract work, his later still photography produced six book-length “portraits” of places: *Time in New England* (1950), *La France de Profil* (1952), *Un Paese* (1955, featuring Luzzara and the Po River Valley), *Tir a’Mhurain / Outer Hebrides* (1962), *Living Egypt* (1969, with James Aldridge), and *Ghana: An African Portrait* (1976, with commentary by Basil Davidson).

Strand married painter Rebecca Salsbury on January 21, 1922, photographing her often in intimate, tightly cropped compositions. They divorced in 1933. He married Virginia Stevens in 1936; they divorced in 1950. He married Hazel Kingsbury in 1951, and they remained together until his death in 1976. Strand’s departure for France coincided with the first libel trial of his friend Alger Hiss, with whom he corresponded until his death. Though never an official Communist Party member, many of his collaborators—such as James Aldridge and Cesare Zavattini—were party members, and others like Basil Davidson were prominent left-leaning writers. Many of his friends were Communists or suspected of being so, including Member of Parliament D. N. Pritt, film director Joseph Losey, poet Hugh MacDiarmid, and actor Alex McCrindle. Strand was also closely involved with Frontier Films, one of over twenty organizations identified as subversive.