Aaron Siskind
American, 1903 - 1991
American photographer. He began serious photography in the early 1930s in New York as a member of the Film and Photo League (1932–5), a group that stressed its socialist commitment to documentary. This was reflected in his early records of Harlem and the Bowery but it was already counterbalanced by an approach that abstracted the subject, often through a concentration upon detail, the play of light and shade or the inclusion of two-dimensional street signs.
The Tabernacle City photographs of the religious community of the island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts (1941) inevitably led to a break with the League’s aims and influenced his formal output between 1941 and 1945. Siskind seemed to ally himself with Group f.64’s work in his desire to achieve a heightened reality by using the close-up while, on the other hand, his concept of ‘the drama of objects’, plunging everyday things into enigmatic or symbolic relationships, recalled Surrealism. In the Gloucester photographs (1944–5) of a Massachusetts coastal community, textures and organic or geometric fragments combine to suggest overtones of death, regeneration and foreboding; they parallel the paintings of the Abstract Expressionists with whom Siskind associated at this time, especially after he joined the Egan Gallery in New York in 1947. Studies of walls and similar expanses from that date, such as Chicago (1952; see 1965 exh. cat.) eliminate depth and transform the evidence of human mark-making or of time’s action upon surfaces into an abstract geography, providing the basis for much of his subsequent work. In this respect Siskind developed both the Abstract Expressionists’ fascination with ambiguous imagery and their metaphors for the tensions of nature and urban existence, turning the photograph into an agent of pure expressive form.
Person TypeIndividual
American, born Finland, born 1945
