Aaron Siskind

Aaron Siskind (1903–1991), artist and educator, holds a preeminent place in the history of American photography. He was the only photographer fully integrated into the Abstract Expressionist circle, drawing inspiration from and inspiring painters including Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Barnett Newman, and in 1951 he was the only photographer included in the Ninth Street Show, the exhibition that announced the movement. He radicalized the medium by establishing photography’s potential as an abstract form of expression and an aesthetic end in itself. His photographs are not purely abstract. He photographed recognizable places and things in a way that made them a new means of communicating ideas and feelings.

Siskind came to photography late and by accident. Born in New York in 1903, he studied literature at the City College of New York, graduating in 1926, intending to be a poet, and taught English in the public schools for more than two decades. A camera given to him by his father-in-law as a wedding present, to record the sights of his honeymoon, opened the world to him. He joined the New York Photo League in 1932 and from 1936 to 1940 led its Feature Group, producing the Harlem Document, Dead End: The Bowery and Portrait of a Tenement.

By the mid-1940s he had turned away from social realism, and what followed was one of the most complete transformations in twentieth-century photography. Working at Gloucester and Martha’s Vineyard, he began isolating and enlarging fragments of the built and weathered world: stains, peeling paint, graffiti, torn posters, rope and ironwork. Only after the external world had been exhausted, as the gallery puts it, did he begin using it as a means of internal self-exploration, harnessing the associative powers of vernacular objects.

Barnett Newman sent him to the dealer Charles Egan, and the exhibition Egan gave him in April 1947 was the first showing of photography at a gallery otherwise devoted to painters. Four more followed through June 1954, in a program that gave Willem de Kooning his first American show and took on Robert Rauschenberg. For those exhibitions Siskind mounted his prints flush to thick Masonite panels, often on wooden stretchers, so that they would carry depth and hold a wall the way a canvas does rather than sit behind glass like a document. He became close to Franz Kline and Mark Rothko, and the work entered the conversation of American painting rather than that of documentary photography. Teaching was the other half of the practice. At Harry Callahan’s invitation he joined the Institute of Design in Chicago in 1951, took over the photography program in 1961, and followed Callahan to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1971, teaching until 1976.

Siskind was a founding member of the Society for Photographic Education and, with Nathan Lyons, of the Visual Studies Workshop in 1969, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966 funded a period in Rome. He photographed into his eighties, travelling repeatedly to Mexico and Italy and returning throughout his life to the divers of Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation, begun in the early 1950s. A centennial in 2003 and 2004 was marked by exhibitions at more than a dozen American institutions, each devoted to a different period or theme.

Bruce Silverstein Gallery has shown the work in REWIND (2021), Drawing the Line (2019), Monochrome (2017), Songs and the Sky (2016), Inscribed (2015), Remnants (2013), DISCOVERIES (2010) and Discoveries (2009).