After nearly a lifetime of traveling and photographing in far-flung places such as Mexico, Ghana, Italy, Scotland and his adoptive country, France, Paul Strand began to concentrate on the stony beauty of his own garden at Orgeval. The work that constitutes The Garden at Orgeval offers a close, exacting study of nature's forms and patterns: tiny button-shaped flowers, cascading winter branches and snarls of twigs. While these photographs exhibit the same directness and precise vision that is so quintessentially Strand, they also reflect his increasing preoccupation with mortality and the fragility of existence.
The photographs in this volume have been selected by the renowned photographer, Joel Meyerowitz--whose own affinity toward the Orgeval series stems from a lifetime of photographing in different genres and ultimately, like Strand, returning to nature as an enduring subject. Meyerowitz also contributes an essay responding to Strand's images and reflecting on the contemplation of gardens and the process of aging.
Paul Strand (1890-1976) was one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century, and among the first to establish photography as an art form. As a youth, he studied under Lewis Hine at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, going on to win acclaim from the likes of Alfred Stieglitz and David Alfaro Siqueiros. After World War II, Strand traveled around the world--from New England to Ghana, France to the Outer Hebrides--and eventually settled in Orgeval, France, where he spent the remaining 27 years of his life.