Artist Profile: Aaron Siskind

The first in my series of profiles on my favorite artists. 



Aaron Siskind was born on December 4, 1903 the fifth of six children to Russian- Jewish immigrants in New York City.
His father was a perpetual store owner who would buy a store grow tired of it then sell it and buy a different type of store. His early interests included writing poetry and music which lead him to get a Bachelor of Social Science degree in Literature. He became an English teacher in the New York public school system. His wife was also a teacher and it was on their honeymoon that Siskind got his first taste of photography. He said in an interview,

 “...And my going into photography was completely an accident. I got married in 1929 and I think the next year we went to Bermuda, my wife and I, and a friend of mine gave me a little camera, a tiny little thing, and I began taking pictures. And that, that was such a joy for me to make pictures. I could see a picture immediately, you know? I always was able to make a picture and I got such pleasure out of it. And, it came so easily - so naturally.”

He joined the Photo League in the 30’s, he slowly acquired equipment to enlarge photographs. He worked with an inexpensive camera,  he would walk out on the street and take pictures, in the area of Harlem, South Street and Wall Street. He would take photographs on weekends while he worked during the week teaching.

In 1936 Siskind became the director of the Photo League's Feature Group, they were a group of young photographers who produced photo-essays of working-class and urban life. Siskind generated a significant socially conscious series of images in the 1930’s documenting the working-class during the Depression. His most well know being the “Harlem Document” Siskind not only showed the impoverished situations of his subjects but also took care in the composition of his photographs. Siskind grew dissatisfied with photo-essays “I think in the documentary photography all you can do is just pile up evidence.”

 On a trip to Martha's Vineyard he started experimenting with his camera, he began focusing on photographing lines, colors, patterns and textures of mundane subjects such as coiled ropes, footprints in sand, and seaweed.

“I have made a few pictures as I went around. I collected some material and I put them places. Just horsing around, just play, you know, seriously and quietly and I made all these pictures. And then I got back to New York and developed them and I saw a remarkable thing. I saw all these pictures that related to each other formally. And the relation between every picture had a relationship between something organic and something geometric...”

Siskind is most remembered for his Abstract Photography. His use of objects taken out of their surroundings and his use of form, mirrored the new movement of abstract painters.  He knew several prominent painters (Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko) of the Abstract Expressionism movement they influenced his style of photography. He started to play with the idea that photography could not just capture the material world but also personal and universal relationships. His work was not immediately accepted by his photographic contemporaries, instead it was greatly admired by painters of the Abstract Expressionism movement such as Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline.

Siskind moved to Chicago in 1951, invited by Harry Callahan to teach photography at the Institute of Design where he taught 1951 to 1971. Later when Callahan left Siskind took over as head of the photography department. In 1971 Callahan again invited him to become a professor this time at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, where he taught until he retired in 1976. In 1984 the Aaron Siskind Foundation was formed, dedicated to helping contemporary photographers.  He died in Providence, Rhode Island on February 8, 1991, at eighty-seven years old.

The “divers” series appeals to me personally. The way the men look as if they are flying or suspended in mid air.  Frozen in a moment of peace, the moment it takes after you jump before you start to fall, where anything can happen. The positions they are in would ordinarily be improbable, that now take on a surreal quality that I find tranquil. There is a serene sense in the action frozen in mid air that is waiting for action but nothing is quite happening.