Paul Strand is one of the most important photographers of the 20th century, whose breakthrough experiments in the 1910s heralded photography’s importance as a modern art form. Early in his career he broke with the soft-focus and Impressionist-inspired ‘Pictorialist’ style of photography, and produced among the first abstract pictures made with a camera. However, it was his portraits of ordinary people that increased his popular appeal. His questioning attitude led him to radically change his work at several points in his career, always with the highest ambitions for the quality of photographic prints and books at the forefront of his thinking. Strand was a committed Marxist with a keen interest in geo-politics. The political climate of American in the 1950s meant that he was inevitably caught up in Senator McCarthy's anti-Communist investigations and was forced to travel, leaving America to live in France. He embarked on a series of book projects, collaborating with various authors, focused around the theme of ancient cultures facing monumental transformations and the heroic endurance of the human spirit.

Strand was in his 60s when he travelled to South Uist, Outer Hebrides, Scotland, and had already established a considerable international reputation. He arrived in the spring of 1954 and spent three months there making photographs in preparation for a book with historian and writer Basil Davidson. The book’s Gaelic title, Tìr a’ Mhurain, means ‘Land of Bent Grass’. During the first few weeks Strand observed the people he would photograph: fishermen, crofters, their wives and children, all set in their natural environment. Nine years after the end of the WWII, South Uist was still a poor place. The vast majority of families depended on the produce from the land and the sea. Davidson’s text gives a history of the island, its dialect, details of personal lives and facts on the economy. Strand chose a local guide Dr Alasdair MacLean, brother of the Gaelic poet Sorley, who knew every family on the island. Dr MacLean spoke the language of the community, he knew the colourful characters and guided Strand towards the people he considered to be the most photogenic. Strand worked hard at understanding his subjects, their environment and the forces that shaped their lives: "I like to photograph people who have strength and dignity in their faces; whatever life has done to them, it hasn't destroyed them. I gravitate toward people like that."

Strand’s political leanings partly explain his choice of South Uist as a subject. In 1953, the military decided to build a rocket testing range there. The Island was poised to become a new frontier in the Cold War. In 1955 the Government announced the plan and began construction. The rocket range does not appear amongst Strand's photographs as it was not yet constructed when he was there. However, Davidson’s texts alludes to the "grim and dubious" project which provoked widespread local resistance. Davidson believed the rocket range would alter forever the community he and Strand were observing. The photographs capture not only a pivotal moment in time, but the end of a particular way of life.