Pioneers of AbEx Photography: In Memoriam David Anfam (1955–2024): Art Basel Miami Beach 2025 | Booth G3

Adger Cowans, a founding member of the Kamoinge Workshop, developed a practice that moves fluidly between photography and painting while remaining deeply committed to expressive abstraction. His involvement with Kamoinge and his later association with AfriCOBRA, the Chicago group dedicated to celebrating Black cultural identity through bold visual experimentation, shaped his belief in the emotional and spiritual power of image making. In Water Patterns, 1960s, Cowans isolates the shifting surface of water until it becomes a vibrating field of rippling lines and flickering reflections, producing an intensity that parallels the gestural freedom of his abstract paintings. The photograph’s calligraphic surface and emphasis on sensation and immediacy connect closely to concerns central to Abstract Expressionism, particularly the atmospheric, linear abstraction found in the work of Norman Lewis. This image demonstrates Cowans’s ability to transform everyday phenomena into expressive visual fields and affirms his role in expanding photographic abstraction within both African American cultural movements and postwar American art.

Lotte Jacobi, a German photographer known for her inventive spirit and fluid movement between portraiture and darkroom experimentation, developed a uniquely improvisational approach grounded in the broader currents of interwar modernism. Working directly on light-sensitive paper, she arranged and shifted translucent materials to create shadows, contours, and drifting lines that read as drawing made with light rather than graphite. Photogenic Drawing, 1945 reveals her interest in gesture, movement, and the atmospheric potential of light, qualities that resonate strongly with the soft transitions and luminous fields explored by Mark Rothko during his 1940s shift toward abstraction. Mounted on a thick wooden support, echoing Aaron Siskind’s practice, the piece emphasizes the photograph as an object and links its energetic forms to the gestural immediacy central to Abstract Expressionism. Jacobi’s combination of spontaneity, material intuition, and experimental technique positions her as a significant precursor to mid-century photographic abstraction.

Herbert Matter, the Swiss-born designer and photographer who studied under Fernand Léger and helped redefine American visual culture through his fusion of European Modernism and experimental photography, brought an inventive approach to light, collage, and form making him one of the most influential visual thinkers of his era. In this Untitled, 1939–1943 image he layers curved translucent planes of fabric across a tightly composed portrait, creating soft arcs, drifting contours, and shifting transparencies that imbue the sitter’s face with a quiet sense of movement and spatial ambiguity. These suspended forms and their interplay of opacity and luminosity closely parallel the gestural language explored by Abstract Expressionist painters such as Arshile Gorky, whose biomorphic transitions and atmospheric curves echo the photograph’s subtle tension. Through this seamless fusion of commercial portraiture and avant-garde experimentation Matter emerges as a vital precursor to mid-century abstraction, demonstrating how photography could anticipate the spatial innovation and expressive depth that would define the Abstract Expressionist movement.

Barbara Morgan was a pioneering American photographer whose practice spanned modern dance photography, Surrealist-inflected photomontage, photograms, and mixed-media works, all unified by her commitment to exploring movement and visual rhythm. After encountering Martha Graham in 1935, she began a collaboration that helped define the photographic language of American modern dance and shaped her interest in translating motion into image. Her Light Drawings, including Pure Energy and Neurotic Man, c. 1940–45, extend this exploration into the darkroom: working in a darkened studio, Morgan traced arcs of light with a handheld flashlight during long exposures while a brief strobe revealed her hand entering the frame. The photograph merges performance and image, preserving both the motion of the light and the presence of the body that produced it. The bold, directional sweeps echo the dynamic stroke and physical momentum found in the paintings of Franz Kline, whose work similarly highlights the force behind the mark. By treating light as a drawing instrument and the camera as a tool for registering gesture in real time, Morgan expanded the expressive possibilities of photography and helped shape the visual approaches that would inform the emergence of Abstract Expressionism.

Arthur Siegel, a pioneering photographer and long-time faculty member at the Institute of Design in Chicago, developed a practice that bridged commercial photojournalism, experimental photograms, and early color processes. After a period of personal turmoil, including a nervous breakdown in 1951, Siegel began Freudian analysis, and at his analyst’s urging turned to the camera as a means of exploring identity. In the series In Search of Myself, 1951, he photographed Chicago’s State Street using multiple exposures and reflections in storefront windows to layer taxis, pedestrians, neon signs, architecture, merchandise, and his own faint portrait into dense, shifting compositions. Printed as dye-transfer photographs, a rare, labor-intensive, and expensive process at the time, the works reflect both the emotional and technical investment in the project. Rather than documenting the city, Siegel dissolves it into a mosaic of color and form that functions as a metaphor for psychological inquiry, with his figure present yet never fully defined. In this way, his work echoes the paintings of Richard Pousette-Dart, whose symbolic networks and radiating surfaces evoke an inner psychology. Through this fusion of personal reflection and experimental technique, Siegel aligned photographic innovation with the inward focus that shaped key developments in postwar abstraction.

Aaron Siskind was the only photographer fully integrated into the Abstract Expressionist circle and one of the most influential figures in twentieth century photography. Beginning as a documentary photographer with the New York Photo League in the 1930s, he shifted decisively toward abstraction in the early 1940s, turning to peeling paint, cracked pavements, tar marked asphalt, graffiti, and other weathered surface textures as subjects. Through close-up framing, careful cropping, and strong contrasts, Siskind transformed these ordinary materials into bold graphic shapes that paralleled the gestural language of Abstract Expressionist painting. He exhibited at the prestigious Charles Egan Gallery, which was a central venue of the New York School representing leading painters such as Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Barnett Newman. Some works in this exhibition are rare vintage prints mounted on Masonite and attached to stretchers, a practice he developed to give his photographs the physical presence of painting and to assert photography’s place within Abstract Expressionism. Through his experimental vision, his relationships with key Abstract Expressionist painters, and his years of teaching at the Institute of Design in Chicago and RISD, Siskind helped establish a photographic language of abstraction, securing his place as an important force in the history of postwar American art.

Frederick Sommer was a true polymath whose work in photography, drawing, painting, collage, and abstract visual musical scores was deeply informed by Surrealism and Dada and explored formal experimentation in ways that prefigure later abstraction. In Arizona Landscape, 1943, made several years before Abstract Expressionism emerged in New York, he framed a horizonless desert scene to create a flattened, tonal field that emphasizes form and texture over literal representation, evoking a psychological and emotional space. In Cut Paper, 1977, he transforms fragile or ephemeral sculptural objects into photographic records, making the image the sole evidence of their existence while exploring form, scale, and spatial ambiguity. Although he was not a core member of the New York School, Sommer’s visual experiments resonate conceptually with mid-century abstraction; his isolation of forms and decontextualization of natural elements align with the concerns of Abstract Expressionist painters. His circle included photographers like Aaron Siskind and avant-garde contemporaries such as Max Ernst. His work was collected early by major institutions, including the Musem of Modern Art, and his photographs were shown in their Abstract Expressionist New York survey (October 3, 2010–April 25, 2011).

Edward Steichen was a foundational figure in early twentieth-century photography and one of the medium’s most influential innovators. His early colored Pictorialist works, including The Flatiron, are among the most celebrated photographs of the period. They set the stage for his later leadership at 291 alongside Alfred Stieglitz, where he helped introduce European Modernism to American audiences before redefining portrait and fashion photography for Vanity Fair and Vogue and eventually leading the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art. In Friends, Romans and Countrymen, c. 1920, he transforms a densely packed field of flowers into an all-over plane of tonal repetition, dissolving descriptive detail into a unified and immersive field of patterned light. This dissolution of individual forms into surface and rhythm anticipates Abstract Expressionism and stands as an important precursor to the all-over intensity pursued by artists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Tobey. The photograph reveals Steichen’s ability to translate the natural world into an expressive visual field and affirms his pivotal role in shaping the foundations on which mid-century abstraction would build.

Alfred Stieglitz was a towering figure in American modern art, instrumental in establishing photography as a serious fine art and fostering the avant-garde through his galleries, publications, and mentorship. Beginning in 1922 at his Lake George retreat, he devoted more than a decade to photographing clouds, ultimately producing over 300 images that came to be known as his Equivalents series. These works were groundbreaking as some of the first intentionally abstract photographs, freeing subject matter from literal representation and instead expressing emotional and spiritual states. Stieglitz printed them as small, handheld contact prints, often without horizon or orientation, inviting viewers to read the shapes purely as form, not landscape. In doing so he advanced a new vision of American modernism that was not rooted in technology or urban progress, but in inner life and universal experience. By prioritizing gesture, composition, and the expressive potential of form, the Equivalents anticipated concerns central to Abstract Expressionism, predating the movement by two decades and establishing a direct lineage to the ways artists like Aaron Siskind would later explore abstraction as a conduit for emotion and psychological depth.