Charles Sheeler (July 16, 1883 – May 7, 1965) was an American artist known for his Precisionist paintings, commercial photography, and the 1921 avant-garde film, Manhatta, which he made in collaboration with Paul Strand.

[2] Returning to the United States, Sheeler felt that he would not be able to make a living as a modernist painter, so he took up commercial photography, focusing on architectural subjects.

[citation needed] Early in his career, he was greatly impacted by the death of his close friend Morton Livingston Schamberg during the influenza epidemic of 1918.

[3] Schamberg's painting had focused heavily on machinery and technology,[4] a theme that featured prominently in Sheeler's own work.

[citation needed] In 1942, Sheeler joined the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a senior research fellow in photography, worked on a project in Connecticut with the photographer Edward Weston, and moved with Musya to Irvington-on-Hudson, some twenty miles north of New York.

The resulting 35mm nine-minute series of vignettes, called Manhatta after Walt Whitman's poem, Mannahatta, was the first avant-garde film created in America.