Paul Strand on photography in America

“Notwithstanding the fact that the whole development of photography has been given to the world through Camera Work in a form uniquely beautiful as well as perfect in conception and presentation, there is no real consciousness, even among photographers, of what has actually happened: the America has really been expressed in terms of America without the outside influence of Paris art-schools or their dilute offspring here… moreover, this renaissance found its highest aesthetic achievement in America, where a small group of men and women consciously, but without any background of photographic or graphic formulae much less any cut and dried ideas of what is Art and what isn’t: this innocence was their real strength”.

Paul Strand, “Photography”, (1917).

Strand, Porch Shadows, 1916.