Aaron Siskind
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Aaron Siskind (December 4, 1903 – February 8, 1991) was an American
photographer A photographer (the Greek φῶς (''phos''), meaning "light", and γραφή (''graphê''), meaning "drawing, writing", together meaning "drawing with light") is a person who uses a camera to make photographs. Duties and types of photograp ...
whose work focuses on the details of things, presented as flat surfaces to create a new image independent of the original subject. He was closely involved with, if not a part of, the abstract expressionist movement, and was close friends with artists Franz Kline (whose own breakthrough show at the Charles Egan Gallery occurred in the same period as Siskind's one-man shows at the same gallery), Mark Rothko, and
Willem de Kooning Willem de Kooning ( , ; April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist. Born in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, he moved to the United States in 1926, becoming a US citizen in 1962. In 1943, he married pa ...
.


Personal life

Siskind was born in New York City, growing up on the
Lower East Side The Lower East Side, sometimes abbreviated as LES, is a historic neighborhood in the southeastern part of Manhattan in New York City. It is located roughly between the Bowery and the East River from Canal to Houston streets. Historically, it w ...
. Shortly after graduating from City College, he became a public school English teacher. Siskind was a grade school English teacher in the New York Public School System for 25 years, and began photography when he received a camera as a wedding gift and began taking pictures on his honeymoon. After joining the Young People’s Socialist League, he met Sidonie, also known as Sonia, Glatter in 1917. A few years later, in 1929, he married her in the spring. In 1942, Aaron met Ethel Jones, with whom he stayed for several years. He divorced Sonia in 1945. Five years later, he met Cathy Spencer and married her in the summer of 1952. He separated from her in 1956, and divorced her a year later. In the summer of 1959, he met Carolyn Brandt and had his third marriage on June 25, 1960. He remained married until his wife's death on January 30, 1976.


Career

Early in his career Siskind was a member of the New York
Photo League The Photo League was a cooperative of photographers in New York City, New York who banded together around a range of common social and creative causes. Founded in 1936, the League included some of the most noted American photographers of the mid-20 ...
, where he produced several significant socially conscious series of images in the 1930s, among them "Harlem Document", a book published in 1981 featuring a collection of 52 photographs, including portraits of residents, as well as photographs of street and domestic life in Harlem. Along with the photographs, the book features interviews, stories and rhymes collected by members of the Federal Writers’ Project. The Harlem Document was aimed to showcase the reality of urban life in New York. In the 1940s, Siskind lived above the Corner Book Shop, at 102 Fourth Avenue in Manhattan; he also maintained a darkroom at this location. In 1950 Siskind met Harry Callahan when both were teaching at Black Mountain College in the summer, where he also met Robert Rauschenberg who throughout his life always kept a particular Siskind print on his work wall (see MOMA retrospective 2017). Later, Callahan persuaded Siskind to join him as part of the faculty of the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago (founded by
László Moholy-Nagy László Moholy-Nagy (; ; born László Weisz; July 20, 1895 – November 24, 1946) was a Kingdom of Hungary, Hungarian painter and photographer as well as a professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by Constructivism (art), con ...
as the New Bauhaus). In 1971 he followed Callahan (who had left in 1961) by his invitation to teach at the
Rhode Island School of Design The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD , pronounced "Riz-D") is a private art and design school in Providence, Rhode Island. The school was founded as a coeducational institution in 1877 by Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf, who sought to increase th ...
, until both retired in the late 1970s. Siskind used subject material from the real world: close-up details of painted walls and graffiti, tar repair on asphalt pavement, rocks, lava flows, dappled shadows on an old horse, Olmec stone heads, ancient statuary and the Arch of Constantine in Rome, and a series of nudes ("Louise"). Siskind worked all over the world, visiting Mexico in 1955 and the 1970s, and Rome in 1963 and 1967. He did the Tar Series in Providence, Vermont, and Route 88 near Westport, Rhode Island, in the 1980s. He continued making photographs until his death from a stroke on February 8, 1991.


Creation of the Feature Group

In 1936, he created a group within the
Photo League The Photo League was a cooperative of photographers in New York City, New York who banded together around a range of common social and creative causes. Founded in 1936, the League included some of the most noted American photographers of the mid-20 ...
in New York, which he called the Feature Group. The group’s collective aim was to produce photographic-centred books. The “Harlem Document” became the most notable project produced by them, which explored the socioeconomic situation that the people living in Harlem were experiencing. In the decades that followed, Siskind’s interest in politics shifted to a more poetic and formal style of photography, zoning on the decay and degeneration found in New York City, and this new style is what garnered him worldwide recognition as a photographer. Siskind’s process revolved around hyper-focusing on what he was photographing, and leaving the background blurry or distractions out of frame.


MoMa Exhibitions Featuring Siskind’s Work

From 1941 to 2022, Siskind’s photographs have been featured in 38 exhibitions at MoMa in New York City. * "Image of Freedom" (October 1941 - February 1942) * "New Photographer" (June - September 1946) * "In and Out of Focus - A Survey of Today’s Photography" (April - July 1946) * "Photographs by 51 Photographers" (August - September 1950) * "Abstraction in Photography" (May - July 1951) * "Christmas Photographs" (November 1951 - January 1952) * "Then and Now" (August 1952) * "Diogenes with a Camera II" (November 1952 - March 1953) * "Photographs from the Museum Collection" (November 1958 - January 1959) * "Photographs for the Museum Collection"  (October 1960) * "50 Photographs by 50 Photographers" (April - May 1962) * "Art in a Changing World: 1884–1964: Edward Steichen Photography Center" (May 1964) * "The Photographer’s Eye" (May - August 1964) * "Siskind Recently" (May - June 1965) * "Steichen Gallery Reinstallation" (October 1967) * "Photography as Printmaking" (March - May 1968) * "Photography: Recent Acquisitions" (July - October 1973) * "Public Landscapes" (September - December 1974) * "Photography for Collectors" (March - June 1976) * "Edward Steichen Photography Center Reinstallation" (December 1979) * "Still Life" (October 1981 - January 1982) * "Reinstallation of the Collection" (October 1980 - January 1982) * "Variants" (December 1985 - March 1986) * "Siskind from the Collection" (July - October 1989) * "Art of the Forties" (February - April 1991) * "Life of the City" (February - May 2002) * "Photography: Inaugural Installation" (November 2004 - June 2005) * "Photography Collection: Rotation 3"(March - November 2006) * "Photography Collection: Rotation 4" (December 2006 - July 2007) * "Photography Collection: Rotation 6" (August 2009 - March 2010) * "Abstract Expressionist New York" (October 2010 - April 2011) * "Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen" (September 2010 - May 2011) * "Photography Collection: Rotation 8" (May 2011 - March 2012) * "One-Way Ticket Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North" (April - September 2015) * "The Shape of Things: Photographs from Robert B. Menschel" (October 2016 - May 2017) * "Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends" (May - September 2017) * "409: Abstract Lens" (Fall 2019 - Fall 2020) * "520: Picturing America" (Fall 2019 - Spring 2022)


Publications

* ''Aaron Siskind Photographs''. Horizon Press, 1959. * ''Bucks County: Photographs of Early Architecture.'' Horizon, 1974. . * ''Places: Aaron Siskind Photographs.'' Siskind and Thomas B. Hess. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976. . * ''Harlem Document Photographs 1932 1940: Aaron Siskind.'' Matrix, 1981. . * ''Road Trip: Photographs 1980-1988 (Untitled 49).'' Friends of Photography, 1989. . * ''Harlem Photographs 1932-1940.'' Smithsonian, 1990. . * ''Aaron Siskind 100.'' powerHouse, 2003. .


Collections

*
Art Institute of Chicago The Art Institute of Chicago, founded in 1879, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the United States. The museum is based in the Art Institute of Chicago Building in Chicago's Grant Park (Chicago), Grant Park. Its collection, stewa ...
, Chicago, IL: 256 prints (as of March 2019) * San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA: 18 prints (as of March 2019) * J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California: 351 works (as of November 2019) *
Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, a ...
, New York: 98 works (as of November 2019) *
Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an Encyclopedic museum, encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the List of largest museums, third-largest museum in the world and the List of larg ...
, New York: 152 works (as of September 2020) * Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA: 362 prints (as of 2022)


References


Further reading


Aaron Siskind collection
at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History * Rosenblum, Harold. ''Siskind, Photographs.'' Horizon, 1959 * Rhem, James. ''Aaron Siskind.'' Phaidon, 2012 * Marika Herskovic
''New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists''
New York School Press, 2000 *Mason Klein and Catherine Evans, ''The Radical Camera: New York's PhotoLeague 1936-1951,'' Yale University Press and The Jewish Museum, 2011


External links


Aaron Siskind Foundation

Siskind at Pitzer College Art Galleries
in the Claremont Colleges Digital Library {{DEFAULTSORT:Siskind, Aaron 1903 births 1991 deaths 20th-century American photographers Photographers from New York (state) Jewish American artists Illinois Institute of Technology faculty 20th-century American Jews American abstract photographers