Paul Strand

Paul beach ( born October 16, 1890 in New York City; † March 31, 1976 in Orgeval ) was one of the most influential American photographers of the 20th century.

Life and work

Beach came as the son of Czech immigrants in New York and grew up there. At the local Ethical Culture School him the basics of photographic working were taught as a prerequisite for the professional photography by his teacher Lewis Hine. Know through him learned beach Alfred Stieglitz and the Photo- Secessionists and began to intensively with its contemporary art deal. In 1909 he completed his education at the ECS and was a member of the New York Camera Club. Until 1911 he worked in his parents' hardware store and then worked as a commercial photographer until 1918. He experimented with soft-focus lenses, rubber printing and enlarged negatives. With his photographic work from this period he showed the negative aspects of modern industrial civilization, life in New York with his human misery and his alienation.

1916 Alfred Stieglitz devoted his last two issues of the magazine Camera Work, accompanied by an exhibition at the Gallery 291 of Stieglitz's. At the same time, Paul explained to beach in the art with the role of photography. In a text in Seven Arts, he stressed the need for media-oriented use of photography, whose objectivity is not as contradictory to art.

From 1918 to 1919 the beach was Radiographer in the Army Medical Corps. After his discharge from the army he photographed landscapes and rock formations, trying to make money in the advertising industry. With the painter and photographer Charles Sheeler beach made ​​the 1920 experimental film Manhatta, an avant-garde film in the genre of the City movie.

With art films and with free photography beach could not deny his livelihood, he began with the purchase of own movie camera in 1922 his freelance work as a cameraman in news and sports area. The photograph appeared in the background, on the weekends and the holidays. This phase of his life - stepping out of the hectic -urban life of New York in his spare time - was reflected in his later work, in the landscape and nature shots. It was a life-long struggle of the city dweller with nature.

Until the late 1920s, Paul created mainly beach close-ups of subjects in nature. " The idea has image [here] clearly. Precedence over the image quality of photography " A first turning point in the confrontation with the landscape photography he created while working on the Gaspé Peninsula in Canada. Here he came to a way of working that understands the photographic process not only pictorially, but also thematically.

Between 1925 and 1930 undertook beach several trips to unfamiliar areas of the USA and Canada. During this time he discovered the rural life of America and the fascination of the representation. From 1932 to 1934 he lived in Mexico. Here he expanded his expression of culture and people, he was appointed Head of Photography and cinematography of the Visual Arts Department at the Ministry of Education. In 1936, he married Virginia Stevens. 1937 to 1944 he was President of Frontier Films, a nonprofit facility for the production of educational films. As a cameraman and director, he produced many documentaries. After almost ten years of film activity beach returned in 1944 back to photography. In the following years he undertook many photo tours and exhibitions. His project Time in New England was to be the attempt to discover the traces of surviving traditions in the manifestations of a region, its landscape and people. The result is a book that describes America as a traditional country with its different historical traces.

1951 could be Paul beach in France down because he offered no American living and working in more prospects, which began Communist persecution during the McCarthy era. In Europe, he was hoping for a place where he could concentrate on a manageable habitat. In the same year he married Hazel Kingsbury. In 1955 he bought a house in Orgeval, near Paris, where he lived until his death. The next twenty years were marked by travel, exhibitions and publications. Paul died in 1976 sechsundachtzigjährig beach at his home in Orgeval.

Reception

" Strands meticulous focus on the particular materiality and form shape his motives and their consequent isolation from the contemporary historical process is a prerequisite for a Konstruierung of the timeless. Each photo is in this sense a formal conscious, autonomous imaginary single statement [ ... ] Not ' Life -Photography ', not acceleration, but the slowdown in the recording process was for him the starting point for a photographic image that formulated as subjective fragment of only one element meant in the designed structure representation of its culture portraits. "

His works are not only documentary but uncompromising in their search for truth. Stieglitz wrote in 1916:

" Beach has added something new to the old. His shots are brutal, direct, free from any nonsense, free from artifice and not influenced by any ism. "

Awards

Exhibitions (selection)

Bibliography (selection)

• Time in New England, New York, Oxford University Press, 1950
• Le France de profile, from Lausanne, La Guilde du Livre, 1952
• Living Egypt, Dresden, VEB Verlag of Art, 1969
• Ghana, An African Portrait, New York, Millerton, 1976
• The world outside my door 1950-1976. Exhibition catalog Essen, Munich, Zurich 1994, ISBN 0-89381-596-9.
• Paul beach. Könemann, Cologne 2001, ISBN 3-89508-604-5.