Aaron Siskind


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 artists Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning.

Personal life

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.
After joining the Young People’s Socialist League, he met Sidonie, also known as Sonia, Glatter in 1917. A few years later, in 1929, he married her in the spring. In 1942, Aaron met Ethel Jones, with whom he stayed for several years. He divorced Sonia in 1945. Five years later, he met Cathy Spencer and married her in the summer of 1952. He separated from her in 1956, and divorced her a year later. In the summer of 1959, he met Carolyn Brandt and had his third marriage on June 25, 1960. He remained married until his wife's death on January 30, 1976.

Career

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", a book published in 1981 featuring a collection of 52 photographs, including portraits of residents, as well as photographs of street and domestic life in Harlem. Along with the photographs, the book features interviews, stories and rhymes collected by members of the Federal Writers’ Project. The Harlem Document was aimed to showcase the reality of urban life in New York.
In the 1940s, Siskind lived above the Corner Book Shop, at 102 Fourth Avenue in Manhattan; he also maintained a darkroom at this location.
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. Later, Callahan persuaded Siskind to join him as part of the faculty of the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago. In 1971 he followed Callahan 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.
Siskind worked all over the world, visiting Mexico in 1955 and the 1970s, and Rome in 1963 and 1967. He did the Tar Series in Providence, Vermont, and Route 88 near Westport, Rhode Island, in the 1980s. He continued making photographs until his death from a stroke on February 8, 1991.

Creation of the Feature Group

In 1936, he created a group within the Photo League in New York, which he called the Feature Group. The group’s collective aim was to produce photographic-centred books. The “Harlem Document” became the most notable project produced by them, which explored the socioeconomic situation that the people living in Harlem were experiencing.
In the decades that followed, Siskind’s interest in politics shifted to a more poetic and formal style of photography, zoning on the decay and degeneration found in New York City, and this new style is what garnered him worldwide recognition as a photographer. Siskind’s process revolved around hyper-focusing on what he was photographing, and leaving the background blurry or distractions out of frame.

MoMa Exhibitions Featuring Siskind’s Work

From 1941 to 2022, Siskind’s photographs have been featured in 38 exhibitions at MoMa in New York City.
  • "Image of Freedom"
  • "New Photographer"
  • "In and Out of Focus - A Survey of Today’s Photography"
  • "Photographs by 51 Photographers"
  • "Abstraction in Photography"
  • "Christmas Photographs"
  • "Then and Now"
  • "Diogenes with a Camera II"
  • "Photographs from the Museum Collection"
  • "Photographs for the Museum Collection" 
  • "50 Photographs by 50 Photographers"
  • "Art in a Changing World: 1884–1964: Edward Steichen Photography Center"
  • "The Photographer’s Eye"
  • "Siskind Recently"
  • "Steichen Gallery Reinstallation"
  • "Photography as Printmaking"
  • "Photography: Recent Acquisitions"
  • "Public Landscapes"
  • "Photography for Collectors"
  • "Edward Steichen Photography Center Reinstallation"
  • "Still Life"
  • "Reinstallation of the Collection"
  • "Variants"
  • "Siskind from the Collection"
  • "Art of the Forties"
  • "Life of the City"
  • "Photography: Inaugural Installation"
  • "Photography Collection: Rotation 3"
  • "Photography Collection: Rotation 4"
  • "Photography Collection: Rotation 6"
  • "Abstract Expressionist New York"
  • "Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen"
  • "Photography Collection: Rotation 8"
  • "One-Way Ticket Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North"
  • "The Shape of Things: Photographs from Robert B. Menschel"
  • "Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends"
  • "409: Abstract Lens"
  • "520: Picturing America"

    Publications

  • Aaron Siskind Photographs. Horizon Press, 1959.
  • 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. Friends of Photography, 1989..
  • Harlem Photographs 1932-1940. Smithsonian, 1990..
  • Aaron Siskind 100. powerHouse, 2003..

    Collections

  • Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL: 256 prints
  • San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA: 18 prints
  • J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California: 351 works
  • Museum of Modern Art, New York: 98 works
  • Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: 152 works
  • Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA: 362 prints