In 1916, Strand made a series of candid street portraits with a hand-held camera fitted with a special prismatic lens, which allowed him to point the camera in one direction while taking the photograph at a ninety-degree angle. This seminal image of a street beggar was published in 1917 as a gravure in Stieglitz’s magazine “Camera Work” and immediately became an icon of the new American photography, which integrated the objectivity of social documentation with the boldly simplified forms of Modernism.
