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Aaron Siskind

Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation 474, 1954

Description

Maker

  • Aaron Siskind, 1903-1991, American, (RISD Faculty 1971-1976, Photography)

Title

Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation 474

Year

1954

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Materials/Techniques

Materials

  • silver print,
  • silver gelatin print

Dimensions

Mount: 50.8 x 40.6 cm (20 x 16 inches)

Type

  • Works on Paper,
  • Photographs

Credit

Gift of the artist

Object Number

73.011.2

Exhibition History

Exhibition History

RISD and Photography

June 5 - October 26, 2008

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.

Related

No Image Available

Aaron Siskind

Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation, 1953-1961

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Use

The images on this website can enable discovery and collaboration and support new scholarship, and we encourage their use. This object is in Copyright. This object is Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation 474 with the accession number of 73.011.2. To request high-resolution files or new photography, please send an email to imagerequest@risd.edu and include your name and the object's accession number.

Feedback

We view our online collection as a living documents, and our records are frequently revised and enhanced. If you have additional information or have spotted an error, please send feedback to curatorial@risd.edu.

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