page_title: Paul Strand
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Paul Strand / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Paul Strand took this photograph from the steps of the New York Federal Hall during morning rush hour. The recently completed building of white marble at 23 Wall Street (on the southeast corner of Wall and Broad Streets) was located in one of the most expensive areas of real estate in New York City. A symbol of financial power, it was the new headquarters of J.P. Morgan and Company. The photograph grew out of what the artist described as an attempt to capture a “kind of movement” that was at once “abstract and controlled.” The long horizontal shadows of the figures counterpose the yawning dark verticals of the Morgan Bank’s windows, and the dynamism of their movement plays off of the building’s solidity. While this image evokes the tenor of urban existence in early twentieth century America, it is just as important for its abstract formal patterns and structures, which Strand believed were uncovered by the camera’s objectivity. The photograph can be seen as the quintessential representation of the uneasy relationship between early twentieth-century Americans and their new cities. Here the people are seen not as individuals but as abstract silhouettes trailing long shadows down the chasms of commerce. The intuitive empathy that Strand demonstrates for these workers of New York's financial district would be evident throughout the wide and varied career of this seminal American photographer and filmmaker, who increasingly became involved with the hardships of working people around the world. In this and his other early photographs of New York, Strand helped set a trend toward pure photography of subject and away from the "pictorialist" imitation of painting.
context_page_description: Paul Strand 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. In the 1930s, he helped found the Photo League. His diverse body of work, spanning six decades, covers numerous genres and subjects throughout the Americas, Europe, and Africa.
context_section_description: In his late teens, he was a student of renowned documentary photographer Lewis Hine at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. It was while on a fieldtrip in this class that Strand first visited the 291 art gallery – operated by Stieglitz and Edward Steichen – where exhibitions of work by forward-thinking modernist photographers and painters would move Strand to take his photographic hobby more seriously. Stieglitz later promoted Strand's work in the 291 gallery itself, in his photography publication Camera Work, and in his artwork in the Hieninglatzing studio. Some of this early work, like the well-known Wall Street, experimented with formal abstractions (influencing, among others, Edward Hopper and his idiosyncratic urban vision).  Other of Strand's works reflect his interest in using the camera as a tool for social reform.
caption: Wall Street (1915)
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