Paul Strand – Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation – Paris

Another wonderful exhibition, Paul Strand at the wonderful Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation. So wonderful to photography being taken seriously. I will leave the word to hime....

" The photographers problem therefore, is to see clearly the limitation and at the same time the potential qualities of his/her medium."

Becoming a Photographer....

" In 1915 , I really became a photographer". Paul Strand belongs to a generation of artists who, in the first decades of the twentieth century, slowly book free of the Pictorialist perspective  or from a form of photography heavily influenced by painting. He thus proclaimed photography's autonomy, affirming the mediums specificities, and defending the idea of photography as an art unto itself, and by itself.

For Strand, it was a time of great experimentation. He sought to identify the various ways in which photography could surpass the other arts. Thought street photography, with subjects such as a blind beggar and a sandwich Boardman, he demonstrated the mediums potential for documenting the living conditions. of disadvantaged populations. In many of his photographs of Manhattan, especially those on WallStreet, he records an arrangement of forms interspersed with human silhouettes that can only be captured through the immediacy of photograph. By tilting the camera downwards and using a tight frame-whether for a series on bowls or from rooftops in New York- he shows that photography is not just a means of realism, it also has capacity for abstraction. Far removed from Pictorialism, Strand worked to express the distinctive features of a new form of vision.