100 PHOTOGRAPHS 95
BLIND by Paul Strand
Even if she could see, the woman in Paul Strand’s pio-
neering image might not have known she was being pho-
tographed. Strand wanted to capture people as they were,
not as they projected themselves to be, and so when docu-
menting immigrants on New York City’s Lower East Side,
he used a false lens that allowed him to shoot in one direc-
tion even as his large camera was pointed in another. The
result feels spontaneous and honest, a radical departure
from the era’s formal portraits of people in stilted poses.
Strand’s photograph of the blind woman, who he said was
selling newspapers on the street, is candid, with the wom-
an’s face turned away from the camera. But Strand’s work
did more than offer an unflinching look at a moment when
the nation was being reshaped by a surge of immigrants.
By depicting subjects without their knowledge—or con-
sent—and using their images to promote social awareness,
Strand helped pave the way for an entirely new form of
documentary art: street photography.