Paul Strand: Aperture Masters of Photography, Number One (Aperture Masters of Photography Series)

Paul Strand was more than a great artist: he was a discoverer of the true potential of photography as the most dynamic medium of the twentieth century. Purity, elegance, and passion are the hallmarks of Strand's imagery. And this inaugural volume of Aperture's Masters of Photography series presents forty-one of Strand's greatest photographs, drawn from a career that spanned six decades.

Included are his earliest experimental efforts, created from 1915 to 1917, which Alfred Stieglitz declared had begun to redefine the medium. Subsequent photographs reveal the artist's impeccable vision in locales as diverse as New England and the Outer Hebrides, France, and Ghana. During Strand's last years, he concentrated on still lifes and the poignant beauty to be found in his own garden at Orgeval, France.

In an introductory essay, Mark Haworth-Booth, Curator of Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, provides an overview of the artist's life and his enduring contribution.

Born in New York City in 1890, Paul Strand studied as a boy under Lewis Hine at the Ethical Culture School. He was an early associate of Alfred Stieglitz, and was strongly influenced by the avant-garde visual arts exhibited at Stieglitz's famed gallery "291." In the 1930s and 1940s, he made films on social issues in Mexico and the United States, then went on to produce some of his finest photographic work in the postwar period. He died at his home in Orgeval, France, in 1976.