It is a truism to say that Paul Strand had a huge impact on the course of photography’s evolution.
The scale of his output, the breadth of attention, the range of expression and the ability to challenge dogma put him into a special class of photographers. Influenced by the pictorialism of Stieglitz early on, he eventually rejected sentimentalism and paved the way for a modern expression that combined documentary reportage with an eye for the aesthetic, I think much like Cartier-Bresson and Kertész.
I have two Paul Strands in my Hallowed Camp, one is an abstract and one a portrait. His portraits are uncompromising as you can see here in this biting, but not untypical, example:
