Aaron Siskind

(December 4, 1903 – February 8, 1991)

Aaron Siskind was an American photographer 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 Mark Rothko, 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), and De Kooning.

Siskind was born in New York City, growing up on the Lower East Side. 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.

Early in his career Siskind was a member of the New York Photo League, where he produced several significant socially conscious series of images in the 1930s, among them “Harlem Document”.

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 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, 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, including Rome in 1963 and 1967, Mexico in 1955 and the 1970s, and in the 1980s the Tar Series in Providence, Vermont, and Route 88 near Westport, Rhode Island. He continued making photographs until his death from a stroke on February 8, 1991.

Bibliography

• 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, 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, New York: 98 works (as of November 2019)

SOME PHOTOS