It was Hine who introduced Strand to Alfred Stieglitz and the Photo Secession Gallery in 1907. In the next few years Strand was exposed both to the new abstract painting and sculpture exhibited by Stieglitz - works by artists such as Picasso, Braque, and Brancusi - and also to the photography of such 19th c. masters as Hill and Adamson and Julia Margaret Cameron, and such contemporary photographers as Edward Steichen. An impeccable printer whose photographs are typified by great richness and sensuousity of surface detail, Strand was one of the major forces of photographic modernism. Embracing a variety of subject matter in his work - landscapes, portraits, still-lifes, architecture, and abstraction - his photographic production was consistent in its concern for formal relationships, its respect for the subject depicted, and an innate classicism. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, mounted its first full-scale retrospective of a contemporary photographer with the work of Strand in 1945. Paul Strand: Town Hall, 1946
Paul Strand: Town Hall, 1946