Paul Strand

Joel Meyerowitz

T&HFL12 After a lifetime of working on a series of "collective portraits" in far-flung places such as Mexico; Ghana; Italy; Tir a'Mhurain, Scotland; and his adoptive country, France, an aging Paul Strand decided to concentrate on still lifes and the stony beauty of his own garden at Orgeval, France, as a site in which to distill his discoveries as a photographer. The work that constitutes The Garden at Orgeval is marked by close and careful study of the forms and patterns within nature--of tiny buttonshaped flowers, cascading winter branches, and fierce snarls of twigs. While the images bear the same directness and precise vision that is quintessentially Strand, the work also reflects a growing metaphorical turn. Renowned photographer Joel Meyerowitz--whose own affinity toward Strand's Orgeval series stems from a lifetime of photographing in different genres and ultimately returning to nature as an enduring subject--will select the photographs in the book, and respond to them in an accompanying personal essay, reflecting on issues, including the contemplation of one's garden and growing old. Beautifully produced in a modest size, in the manner of a volume of poems, this book's task is to do credit to Strand's final work, both as an individual and as a key figure in Modernist photography.

The Garden at Orgeval

J. Paul Getty Museum

Anne M. Lyden

Weston J. Naef

Associate Curator of Photographs Anne M Lyden

Paul Strand (1890-1976) defined twentieth-century American photography in a prolific career that spanned more than sixty years. His photographs explore the abstract and dynamic qualities found in the natural world, search for humanity in portraits of people and places, and document the experience of life itself. Highlighting the development of the photographer's aesthetic from his early encounters with Cubism to his humanistic depictions of people throughout the world, this book presents nearly forty years of Strand's wide-ranging and powerful work. In Focus: Paul Strand is published to coincide with an exhibition of the photographer's work at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles from May 10 through September 4, 2005. Commentaries on the pictures, along with an introduction and chronology of Strand's life, are provided by Anne Lyden, associate curator of photographs at the Getty Museum. The book also includes an edited transcript of a colloquium on Strand's work that incorporates Lyden's contributions along with those of five other participants: David Featherstone, a freelance writer and editor; Weston Naef, curator of photographs at the Getty Museum; Naomi Rosenblum, independent scholar; Mark Ruwedel, photographer and professor of photography at California State University, Long Beach; and Alan Trachtenberg, Neil Gray Jr. Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies at Yale University.

Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum

Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.)

Maria Morris Hambourg

Published to accompany an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from February 1998, this is a study of the achievements of the early career of the American photographer, Paul Strand (1890-1976). After studying photography in New York with the social reformer Lewis Hine, Strand began to absorb the ideas of the European avant-garde, and fellow-photographer and art entrepreneur Alfred Stieglitz heralded Strand's pictures as the first images of an incisive modern vision.

Paul Strand

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