Paul Strand - classic black and white photographic style. Paul Strand's achievement as an artist and innovator is universally acknowledged by serious black and white photographers, yet he was badly neglected until the major exhibition now touring the country revived interest in his work. Strand? people said. Is Paul Strand still around? Students of black and white photography knew that 60 years ago he had struck a new note in photographic style that reverberates down to this day. Lovers of fine pictures welcomed occasional books that showed his mastery of the medium to be undiminished. Strand, however, had somehow dropped out of the small but influential world in which reputations are made and sustained, and people thought of him more as an influential figure out of the past than as a living artist who was still doing notable work. Strand, who is now 82 and working hard in France, resists such attempts to relegate him to history. "I may be a monument," he protests, "but I'm still alive." And so he is, as his exhibition abundantly shows. Originating in Philadelphia in late 1971, traveling to St. Louis and Boston in 1972 and going on to New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco in 1973, the exhibition demonstrates for the first time the full range and variety of Strand's work: the semiabstract pictures of machinery; the lovingly observed leaves, roots and rocks; the classic landscapes; the solemn, brooding portraits of simple people as tough and resilient as the earth they tend. The latest black and white photographs, taken in Morocco, Ghana and Romania between 1960 and 1967, were never shown publicly before. The earliest black and white photographs-the New York street scenes and the still lifes - that first won him admiration back in 1915 have not been seen in such quantity since 1945, the year The Museum of Modern Art gave him his only previous full-scale exhibition. The current show of nearly 500 pictures amply supports the view of Strand's early admirers and confirms his position as a modern black and white photography master. Yet its very success raises a nagging question. If Strand is as good as he now appears to be, why was he half-forgotten for 20 years? Strand's own explanation has the monumental simplicity of his pictures: he was neglected because black and white photography itself was not yet well enough recognized as an art form. There is certainly some basis for this view. Even today black and white photography has not achieved the prestige of painting, and no black and white photographer is as well known as, for instance, Picasso. But there is more to it than that. As a young man in the first decades of this century, Strand was one of a band of embattled painters and black and white photographers who gathered around Alfred Stieglitz in his pace-setting gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue. Stieglitz pioneered in the exhibition of black and white photographs as works of art and introduced the art of Matisse and Picasso to America, but he thought of himself more as an artistic missionary than as a businessman and he hated the idea of mixing art and money. "I am not a salesman," he declared. The author of this article, Gene, the black and white photography critic of The New York 'writer and lecturer on art and black and white photog. longtime student of Paul Strand s who interviewed Strand at his home.'In his darkroom apron, 27-year-old Paul Strand was photographed in 1917 by Alfred Stieglitz at the influential "291" gallery, in which Stieglitz introduced innovative young painters, sculptors and black and white photographers. Fifty-five years later Stand posed for Robert Haiko on a return visit to the United States for the opening of the huge retrospective exhibition of his life's work. Quarrels with potential customers, "nor are the pictures here for sale, although under certain circumstances certain pictures may be acquired." From Stieglitz, Strand learned to make a sharp division between art and commerce and, when he decided to be a black and white photographer, he chose to devote himself to art alone. It was not the only choice he could have made. At that time fashion photography, black and white photojournalism and advertising black and white photography were all getting started. Two other members of Stieglitz' group, Baron de Meyer and Edward Steichen, found ways to combine their views of art with commercial interests and went on to fame and fortune as pioneering fashion black and white photographers for Vogue and Vanity Fair.