Paul Strand (1890-1976) was born in New York and attended the Ethical Culture School, based on the principles of John Dewey, a popular choice for those middle-class Jewish families who wished to assimilate into secular schooling American society.(Encarta) In 1907 he joined the photography classes and club taught by Lewis Hine, the greatest American documentary photographer of his time, who photographed living conditions in slum areas and the treatment of immigrants upon arrival on Ellis Island, and campaigned for calls for child labor laws through photographs of "Children Working" on the streets, in factories and mines. (Capa)Hine took his students to Alfred Stieglitz's "Gallery at 291," which made an overwhelming impression on the seventeen-year-old Strand, who later returned to discuss his photographs with Stieglitz. After leaving school, Strand began working in the family business, continuing to photograph in his spare time. (Encarta) His early works followed the pictorialist model of photographic secession, but further visits to 291 and other galleries and discussions with Stieglitz meant that Strand was kept up to date with new modern art from Europe. He shared Stieglitz's growing disillusionment with pictorialism, and in particular his growing insistence that photography should exploit the unique possibilities it offered, particularly its ability to describe the scene with greater detail and accuracy than the human hand, rather than attempting to imitate painting or drawing. (Rosenblum) Strand has expressed his views clearly and forcefully in numerous articles. Strand was one of the first photographers to address the problems and visual approaches he saw in modern art. By 1915 this was clearly manifested in his work, with an interest in geometric shapes, patterns, rhythm, space and division of the frame; the images were like a knife cutting the butter of pictorialism. Stieglitz welcomed it with enthusiasm, exhibiting it in the gallery and making it the protagonist of the latest issues of Camerawork. (Web Galleries) The "White Fence", perhaps the best known of this period, shows the pickets of a fence painted white in the lower half of the painting, establishing a syncopated rhythm from their imperfections. The spaces between the posts show an area of ​​dark grass, pictorially of equal weight to the white wood, creating a "figure-ground opposition" (we can see it as light areas on a dark background or dark areas on a light background) in this part of the painting, producing the spatial illusion of bringing the horizontal grassy expanse onto a vertical visual plane.