Aaron Siskind

By the late 1930s, Siskind was a successful documentary photographer working with the Photo League in New York on projects such as the Harlem Document, which brought attention to socio-economic disparity. Grave political events in Europe and a growing societal focus on interior life in the early 1940s, created in him a desire for abstract, metaphorical pictures. He was looking for a way to make photographs that were more closely related to the expressiveness of poetry or music, his first loves. In photographs such as the Gloucester (glove), 1944, isolated objects became suggestive of contemporary anxieties, here perhaps the disfiguration of war or a plea for divine help. Siskind also found meaning in stains, peeling paint, and remnants of posters on walls of urban environments, wherein he saw allusions to figures, landscapes, or other organic forms. His development of abstract photography was concurrent and in dialogue with the paintings of the Abstract Expressionists, but he continued to work from the figure sporadically throughout his life. His series of divers, Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation, are superb examples of the emotional breadth of his work. Siskind left his position as a grade-school teacher in 1949 and began to instruct photography at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, from 1951 until 1971, at which time he became a professor at RISD.