Hazel Strand, his third wife, comes to the door, gray-haired, grandmotherly, dressed in slacks and a sweater. She had been a staff black and white photographer for the Red Cross when they met in 1949, but after their marriage she gave up black and white photography because "it got too crowded in the darkroom." Now she devotes herself to making it easier for Strand to get on with his work, a full-time job that includes not only running the household-and occasionally helping out in the darkroom-but also pitching in to serve as public relations counselor when the need arises. The setting is idyllic, and friends come out from Paris and young black and white photographers drop by to view the Master. There is, however, trouble in paradise. Though 60 years have passed since Stieglitz and his group established the fact that black and white photography is art, there are still doubters in the world, and Strand is apt to become testy when reminded of them. "The question of whether a black and white photograph is a work of art is a stupid question," he says. "There is no such thing as an art, anyway. There are materials that artists work with-paint, stone, bronze-but materials aren't arts, the arts are what certain individuals do with them. So if a man chooses to use a black and white camera and the materials of black and white photography and can produce with these something that other people recognize as having the qualities and characteristics of art, then the question is automatically answered." Strand's own claims to recognition rest on achievements that stretch out over more than half a century. When he was beginning, the fashion in art black and white photography was a kind of misty impressionism, all soft focus, blurred outlines, and gauze over the lens. He himself worked that way at first, as did his associates at Stieglitz' gallery. But at the gallery he began to see the abstract works of the artists who were then revolutionizing the Paris art world - Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Brancusi - and in the summer of 1915, at his father's vacation house in Connecticut, he made a group of his own abstractions by black and white photographing common household objects in such extreme close-up that they were sometimes unidentifiable. These experiments, he says, taught him the elements of design and color that are fundamental to all art, and he then began to apply this lesson to the world around him. The result was "The White Fence," a picture so modern in its feeling and so free from the established conventions of black and white photography that it became a landmark. Other black and white photographers began to move in the same direction, and by the mid-'20s the misty, impressionist style, with its reliance on complicated darkroom manipulations, had been replaced by the sharp focus approach that prevails today. This innovation alone would have won Strand a place in black and white photographic history, but his later pictures enlarged it. In the characteristic work of his maturity Strand has brought together the social concerns of Hine and the esthetic approach of Stieglitz, focusing on the lives of simple people living in backward or isolated parts of the world: provincial Mexico in the 1930s, a desolate island of the Outer Hebrides, the peasant villages of modern Egypt.Many of these pictures are portraits of individuals. In others he shows his sitters with the hand-worn tools of their livelihood, the houses they and their forefathers have lived in, the countryside that supports them and that they in turn nurture and care for. These calm and classic pictures, with their stoic, almost elegiac mood, sometimes seem old-fashioned to younger black and white photographers. Strand has also been criticized for repetitiveness, since for more than 40 years he has taken the same kinds of pictures, even though in different locations.