Encompassing over 200 pieces that range from exquisite vintage photographic prints to films, books, notebooks and sketches, the Paul Strand: Photography and Film for the 20th Century is the first major UK exhibition dedicated to the pioneering photographer in over four decades.

For the first time in the UK in 40 years, a major retrospective on US photographer Paul Strand (1890-1976) opens at the Victoria & Albert (V&A). The exhibition is the first of its kind since Strand’s death in 1976, and shows how the pioneering photographer defined the way fine art and documentary photography is understood and practised today.

Blind Woman

Part of a tour organised by Philadelphia Museum of Art, the exhibition reveals Strand’s trailblazing experiments with abstract photography, screens what is widely thought of as the first avantgarde film and shows the full extent of his photographs made on his global travels beginning in New York, the US, in 1910 and ending in France in 1976. Newly-acquired photographs from Strand’s only UK project – a 1954 study of the island of South Uist in the Scottish Hebrides – are also on show, alongside other works from the V&A’s own collection.

Paul Strand: Photography and Film for the 20th Century en-compasses over 200 objects from exquisite vintage photographic prints to films, books, notebooks, sketches and Strand’s own cameras to trace his career over 60 years.

Arranged both chronologically and thematically, the exhibition broadens understanding of Strand as an international photographer and filmmaker with work spanning myriad geographic regions and social and political issues.

Angus Peter McIntyre, shot in the Outer Hebrides.

“The V&A was one of a handful of UK institutions to collect Strand’s work during his lifetime and the museum now houses the most extensive collection of his prints in the UK. Through important additional loans, the exhibition explores the life and career of Strand, but also challenges the popular perception of Strand as primarily a photographer of American places and people of the early 20th century,” said curator Martin Barnes.

The exhibition begins in Strand’s native New York in the 1910s, exploring his early works of its financial district, railyards, wharves and factories. During this time, he broke with the soft- focus and Impressionist-inspired ‘Pictorialist’ style of photography to produce some of the first abstract pictures made with a camera. The influence of photographic contemporaries Alfred Stieglitz and Alvin Langdon Coburn, as well European modern artists such as Braque and Picasso, can be seen in Strand’s experiments in this period.

The exhibition reveals Strand’s trailblazing experiments with abstract photography

On display are early masterpieces such as Wall Street which depicts the anonymity of individuals on their way to work set against the towering architectural geometry and implied economic forces of the modern city. Strand’s early experiments in abstraction, Abstraction, Porch Shadows and White Fence are also shown, alongside candid and anonymous street portraits, such as Blind Woman, made secretly using a camera with a decoy lens.

The exhibition explores Strand’s experiments with the moving image with the film Manhatta (1920- 1921). A collaboration with the painter and photographer Charles Sheeler, Manhatta was hailed as the first avant-garde film, and traces a day in the life of New York from sunrise to sunset punctuated by lines of Walt Whitman’s poetry.

Strand’s embrace of the machine and human form is a key focus of the exhibition.

In 1922, he bought an Akeley movie camera. The close-up studies he made of both his first wife Rebecca Salsbury and the Akeley during this time are shown alongside the camera itself. Extracts of Strand’s later, more politicised films, such as Redes (The Wave), made in co-operation with the Mexican government, are featured, as well as the scarcely-shown docu-mentary Native Land, a contro- versial film exposing the violations of America’s workforce.

Driveway Orgeval

Strand travelled extensively and the exhibition emphasises his international output from the 1930s to the late 1960s, during which time he collaborated with leading writers to publish a series of photobooks. As Strand’s career progressed, his work became increasingly politicised and focused on a type of social documentary along-side the desire to depict a shared humanity.

The exhibition features Strand’s first photobook Time in New England (1950), along-side others, including a homage to his adopted home France and his photographic hero Eugène Atget, La France de Profil, which he made in collaboration with the French poet, Claude Roy.

One of Strand’s most celebrated images, The Family, Luzzara, was taken in a modest agricultural village in Italy’s Po River valley for the photobook Un Paese, for which he collaborated with the neo-realist screen writer, Cesare Zavattini. On display, this hauntingly direct photograph depicts a strong matriarch flanked by her brood of five sons, all living with the aftermath of World War II.

From the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, Strand photo-graphed in Egypt, Morocco and Ghana, all of which had gone through transformative politi-cal change. The exhibition shows Strand’s most compelling pictures from this period, including his tender portraits, complemented by street pictures showing public meetings and outdoor markets.

The exhibition concludes with Strand’s final photo-graphic series exploring his home and garden in Orgeval, France, where he lived with his third wife Hazel until his death in 1976.

The images are an intimate counterpoint to Strand’s previous projects and offer a rare glimpse into his own domestic happiness.

Paul Strand: Photography and Film for the 20th Century runs until July 3 at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, the UK.