Tir a'Mhurain is a collection of photographs that reflects the impressions gathered by Paul Strand and his wife Hazel during their 3-month visit to the Hebrides in 1945. Juxtaposing people and landscape, Strand's beautifully sequenced photographs depict the perfect complicity he saw between nature and habitation in their wild terrain. Whether it is a view of the rocks and the sea or a grinning shepherd boy; scuddling clouds hanging over seaside house or the wrinkled face of an old lady framed by a knitted shawl, Strand's images transcend the ephemeral. This extended portrait captures the essence and complexity of a singular place. This is a true masterpiece of photography.

The Aperture Masters of Photography Series has become a touchstone of Aperture's longstanding commitment to introducing the history and art of photography to a broader public. Each volume provides an ongoing comprehensive view of the artists who have helped shape the medium. Initially presented as the History of Photography Series in 1976, the first volume featured Henri Cartier-Bresson and was edited by legendary French publisher Robert Delpire, who cofounded the series with Aperture's own Michael Hoffman. Twenty volumes have been published in total, each of them devoted to an image-maker whose achievements have accorded them vital importance in the history of photography. Each volume presents an evocative selection of the photographer's life's work, introduced with a foreword by a notable curator or historian of each artist. The series will be relaunched in Fall 2014, beginning with books on Paul Strand and Dorothea Lange, elegantly updated and refreshed for today's photography-hungry audiences, and introducing new, image-by-image commentary and chronologies of the artists' lives for each of the previously published titles. The series will also include entirely new titles on individual artists. The Aperture Masters of Photography Series is an unparalleled library of both historical and contemporary photographers, and serves as an accessible compilation for anyone studying the history of photography.

T&HFL12 After a lifetime of working on a series of “collective portraits” in far-flung places such as Mexico; Ghana; Italy; Tir a’Mhurain, Scotland; and his adoptive country, France, an aging Paul Strand decided to concentrate on still lifes and the stony beauty of his own garden at Orgeval, France, as a site in which to distill his discoveries as a photographer. The work that constitutes The Garden at Orgeval is marked by close and careful study of the forms and patterns within nature—of tiny buttonshaped flowers, cascading winter branches, and fierce snarls of twigs. While the images bear the same directness and precise vision that is quintessentially Strand, the work also reflects a growing metaphorical turn. Renowned photographer Joel Meyerowitz—whose own affinity toward Strand’s Orgeval series stems from a lifetime of photographing in different genres and ultimately returning to nature as an enduring subject—will select the photographs in the book, and respond to them in an accompanying personal essay, reflecting on issues, including the contemplation of one’s garden and growing old. Beautifully produced in a modest size, in the manner of a volume of poems, this book’s task is to do credit to Strand’s final work, both as an individual and as a key figure in Modernist photography.

Seven-year-old Paul strolled through the orchard, sampling the antique apples that surrounded the abandoned farm house. He wondered how long he would live in this place. After all, he had already resided in more places than a kid his age should have, and would end up attending twenty schools in nearly as many locations. Paul's experiences while growing up in the Pacific Northwest include adventure, humor and a portrayal of how life was, "back then." Our SeaTac International Airport was a forest where kids watched bulldozers clear runways. Well traveled hills that now lead to freeways are the ones where Paul sped his soapbox racers. And because of his family's nomadic lifestyle; he watched his dad build their tiny home of whatever their patch of forest provided, lived in a 4,000 trailer house community at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, spent time at the infamous Briscoe Boys School and lived in a house built by the kindly brother-in-law of Dinah Shore . Readers are guaranteed to enjoy this sometimes poignant, sometimes sad, sometimes humorous but always intriguing account of the adventurous life lived "When Grandpa Was a Kid."