Aaron Siskind

“The thing that stimulated me most was in my mind there was this title, which happened to me very rarely, “the pleasures and terrors of levitation.” And so I began working on that. That helped me determine a number of things, you know, that the picture had to be square, that the ground had to be negative, no clouds and that kind of stuff, and the figure itself was not to have too much detail. Those were the determinations I made. In order to get that kind of a picture of the kids diving in the lake, I had to be there at a certain time so that sun was not too far in the west and it would hit them. And, I would get a fully delineated figure. I have to be there on a day when there were a lot of people, especially young people there who were horsing around, you see, ‘cause then things happened. A guy came up there and did a perfect swan dive, it didn’t interest me at all.” Siskind in taped conversation with Harry Callahan and David Travis at Art Institute of Chicago, May 27, 1982.