Clare Strand

Clare Strand (born 1973) is a British conceptual photographer based in Brighton and Hove in the UK.

She makes, as David Campany puts it, "black-and-white photographs that would be equally at home in an art gallery, the offices of a scientific institute, or the archive of a dark cult. ... They look like evidence, but of what we cannot know."

Strand was born in Brighton, England, in 1973.

She studied at North East Surrey College of Technology, University of Brighton (1992–1995), and at Royal College of Art, London (1996–1998), where she gained an MA in fine-art photography.

Strand's first exhibition was as part of the touring exhibition, The Dead, curated by Val Williams and Greg Hobson, which opened at the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television in 1995.

It included work by various photographers including Nobuyoshi Araki, Krass Clement, Donigan Cumming, Hans Danuser, Andres Serrano, Nick Waplington.

Around 2000–2002, they made commercial work for Sleazenation, contributing photographs for stories.

Strand's most notable series are Signs Of A Struggle (2002), Gone Astray Details (2002/3), Gone Astray Portraits (2002/3), The Betterment Room - Devices For Measuring Achievement (2005), Conjurations (2007-9), Skirts (2011), 10 Least Most Wanted (2011), Spaceland/Flatland (2012), The Happenstance Generator (2015), and The Entropy Pendulum and Out Put. (2015).

Strand's work is held in the following public collections:

Strand's work has been published in the books Clare Strand: Photoworks Monograph (2009), Skirts (2013) and Girl Plays with Snake (2016).

She has had solo exhibitions at Museum Folkwang in Germany, National Museum, Kraków and Centre Photographique d'Ile de France.

She has been included in group exhibitions at National Media Museum in Bradford, and at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), Media Space and Barbican Centre in London.

Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the V&A; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; New York Library; Arts Council England and the British Council.

Her first major solo exhibition was Clare Strand Photography and Video at Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany in 2009.

Strand's significant proportion of the group exhibition Signs of a Struggle: Photography in the Wake of Postmodernism, which took its title from Strand's piece, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, in 2010 was singled out for praise in Aesthetica and The Independent.

She is one half of creative partnership MacDonaldStrand with her husband Gordon MacDonald.

In 2011 she had her first major London solo exhibition, Sleight, at Brancolini Grimaldi, the gallery that represented her at the time.

In 2012 they self-published Bad Things Happen To Good People and Most Popular Of All Time.

David Campany has written that "she is a photographer whose primary context is the medium itself and the habits of seeing, knowing, and picturing that have formed around it."

Strand says that involves "investigating its origins, uses – and limitations".

Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian, has said "there is always something odd – in a good way – about Strand's work. That oddity rests in the tension between her often personal, always playful take on conceptualism and her wilfully old-fashioned methods".

Her work has been described as surreal, having a "paranormal, scientific atmosphere", a narrative mystery, inspired by magic (illusion) and vernacular photography.

In 2019 she was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society.

She is one half of creative partnership MacDonaldStrand with her husband Gordon MacDonald.