Paul Strand Photography

The article, “Photography and Photography and the New God” was written by an American photography named Paul Strand. He began photography under the watchful eye of Lewis Hine in 1907. Hine introduced Strand to the work of the Photo-Secession. In 1911, he became an independent photographer and broke with the Impressionist style of Secession. Through his modernists theory, he helped to establish photography as an art form during the twentieth century. He is recognized as one of American greatest photographers along with Edward Weston and Alfred Stieglitz. The article reflects his views on photography. Strand believes that it is a fine art with the potential of its own, independent from other artistic forms of expression. He worked toward redefining and realigning photography with a new, straight approach. As he recognized the artists before the Reformation to be renowned for their work, the post-reformation photography he viewed as focussed on financial gains and bending to the tastes of the masses preferring the manipulated by the brush work, or the gum bichromate process, favored by secessionists for its soft, impressionist results. His negative attitude toward the soft-focus work stemmed from his belief that photography's strength lied in its capacity to depict detail clearly.Like many secessionists he chose his subjects from the surrounding life, unlike them he photographed them in sharp focus. He viewed objectivity of photography to be its contribution as well as a limitation. He feared that the majority of photographers had misunderstood the inherent quality of …show more content…
He argues that the use of mechanical manipulation and alteration in a process to make realistic images appear to be a different type of medium takes away takes away from the natural expression of the photograph. As he stated;" If a photograph is changed in such way, it is no longer a