The early images resonate with passion and a sense of conscious disclosure of private concerns. Oddly, almost as soon as they married they began on many levels to draw apart. They are the photographs of a man who learned to let go of the woman he loved most in order to see her whole. Before Stieglitz, no exhibiting photographer had ever spent so much time looking at one single person. One can find their echoes in the work of Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, Sally Mann, Nicholas Nixon, Emmet Gowin, Nan Goldin and countless others who, consciously or not, have taken that idea elsewhere - though none, I think, has ever taken it further.
Strand often receives credit for introducing Cubist ideas to photography.
Yet I'd propose that Strand absorbed and reflected in his work primarily the look of Cubism, not its theoretical underpinnings. For this viewer, at least, here is where Cubism in photography begins. Unless we were present and conscious of it at its birth, we can never truly feel what a work meant in its own day to its contemporaries. We can only try to imagine ourselves back to the moment of its conception and debut, when the first attempts to make meaning of it took place. Few today were even born when this astonishing nexus of ideas hit the ground running, and none can remember that occasion.