Blind Beggar
Photographer: Paul Strand
Date: 1916
Location: New York City, USA
Paul Strand photographed a blind woman selling newspapers and apples on the streets of New York City in 1916, using a camera with a false side lens so she would not know she was being photographed. Published in Camera Work in its final issue in 1916–1917, along with other of Strand's New York photographs, 'Blind Woman' marked a decisive break with the soft-focus painterly pictorialism that had dominated art photography, establishing instead a hard-edged, direct, modernist approach that would define documentary photography for the rest of the century. The photograph is considered one of the foundational works of American modernist photography and a key document in the history of street photography.
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