50 dutone images and 45 four-color images

For Paul Strand, the great pioneer of modernism, the summers of 1926 and 1930–1932 were a return to experimentation and periods of great artistic growth. He worked in makeshift darkrooms - one in a hotel basement and another above the Taos movie theater. The Southwest period brought not only artistic renewal, but also personal turmoil. His political and social ideas were shifting, and his relationship with the two most important people in his life - his wife Rebecca and his mentor Alfred Stieglitz - were disintegrating. This book reconstructs, in an intimate, visual way, the emotional and creative swirl around Paul Strand, through beautiful reproductions of his images from the period and a comprehensive collection of notes, illustrations, and ephemera.

While a handful of Strand’s Southwest photographs have been previously published, this period of his outstanding career remains largely unexplored. Paul Strand Southwest presents many images for the first time, including dramatic landscapes, decayed ghost towns, the noble architecture of adobe churches, and his final, austere portraits of Rebecca.

Paul Strand: Sixty Years of Photographs, a long-unavailable Aperture classic, is one of the most comprehensive surveys of the power and force of a major photographic figure of our time. Before his death in 1976 at age eighty-five, Strand combed his photographic prints and his many books with an eye to the completion of this volume. Seen here is the summation of a lifework, from the first abstract photographs to the series of plant photographs taken in the last years of his life. Also included is a rarely examined series of films - brilliant, unprecedented documentaries that foreshadowed Italian neo-realism and the new cinema of the post-war years.

The re-release of this volume, which features the famous biographical profile by Calvin Tomkins and excerpts from Strand's correspondence, interviews, and other documents, makes one of photography's major artists newly accessible.

41 duotone images

Paul Strand was more than a great artist: he discovered that photography had the potential to be the most dynamic medium of the twentieth century. Purity, elegance, and passion are the hallmarks of Strand's imagery. 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 of 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 to photography.