Paul Strand's photographs of sharp-edged realism

Paul Strand (1890-1976) established himself as the foremost early modernist photographer in the United States during the decade of World War I.

His innovation was a sharp-edged realism that he employed not so much as a narrative tool, as his mentor Lewis Hine did, but to create powerful aesthetic statements.

After beginning as a soft-focus pictorialist, Strand created images that were both candid and resonant with the tensions of modern life.

He documented, but he always put a personal spin on his subjects, whether people or places, to accentuate what he perceived to be their essential character.

In his own way, Strand was just as much an artistic trailblazer as any of his painter compatriots in the Alfred Stieglitz circle, including Georgia O'Keeffe and Arthur Dove. His early work in particular constitutes a major benchmark in 20th-century photography; long before his death he was acknowledged as a master.

A New York native, he was introduced to Stieglitz, who brought his work to public attention, by Hine, with whom he began to study photography in 1907. Hine's images of children working in factories and coal mines were instrumental in promoting legislation to control the labor abuses that Hine portrayed so graphically.

Strand didn't follow Hine's example, however. His earliest photographs are pictorialist, the aesthetic Stieglitz was promoting at the turn of the 20th century. Pictorialists tried to imitate painting and evoke romantic moods by blurring their images, and they also appealed to nostalgia for a pastoral way of life.

Even in early pictorialist photos, Strand's compositional rigor precluded sentimentality from dominating themes that were easily sentimentalized.

Stieglitz gave Strand a solo exhibition at his 291 Gallery on Fifth Avenue in 1916, a watershed year in his career. Strand's concern for modernist ideals boldly asserted itself in photographs such as Blind Woman and Wall Street that remain icons of his style today.

In such pictures, he pursued two ideas - expressing fundamental truths inherent in his subject matter, and fragmenting an object or scene in the cubist manner, leaving aside any social context.

Whether concerned with reality or abstraction, the photographs Strand made before 1920, when he began to make portraits, tend to be powerfully reductive and to emphasize contrast.

These characteristics would consistently mark his work throughout his career, whether he was photographing people, places, buildings, or objects in the United States, Mexico, or Europe, to which he moved in 1951.

Strand shifted his subjective focus a number of times, but the elemental force that emanates from images such as the famous Ranchos de Taos Church, New Mexico, made in 1931, never diminished. It's as evident in his portraits as in his close-ups of machinery, buildings, and flowers.

Rarely does one find an extraneous detail in a Strand image; instead, there's always a pervasive intensity, as if he had distilled a motif to its irreducible minimum, or had framed it to enhance its latent monumentality.

His portraits of Rebecca, his first wife (he had three), made in the 1920s and early '30s, demonstrate how his concern for essence could transform an ordinary theme.

These portraits aren't physically descriptive, nor are they affectionate, romantic, or emotionally intimate - all qualities one might expect to find in an artist's photographs of his wife. Rather, they're blunt evocations of an individuality so distinctive that it becomes iconic through repetition.

In part, the force in Strand's photographs derives from his technique. He was partial to high-contrast, lightly toned prints that dramatized white or bright highlights, such as buildings or reflections.

Like Stieglitz and Ansel Adams, he was a meticulous darkroom craftsman, who labored over his prints to bring them as close to perfection as he could.

For the centennial of his birth, the National Gallery of Art organized a major retrospective that traveled to five other American museums and London. In the exhibition catalog, the Gallery was able to duplicate the subtle tonalities of Strand's platinum- and silver-print originals.

The last important Strand show before 1990 was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1971-72, four years before he died. His show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1945 was the first solo show of photography ever presented there.