Article

Collection Publications: Aaron Siskind at 100

November 7, 2019

Few artists have had as profound and wide-ranging an impact on their medium as has Aaron Siskind. His reputation is built on five decades of innovative picture making, as wel Ias on his role as one of the country's leading photographic educators, first at the Institute of Design in Chicago, and later at the Rhode Island School of Design.To mark the centenary of his birth, the museum has organized a selection of Siskind's work from its permanent collection, which contains one of the largest bodies of the artist's vintage prints. Born in New York in 1903, Siskind began his artistic career as a documentary photographer.His early work, such as the Harlem Document project, reflected his membership inthe Photo-League,an organiza tion devoted to social and documentary photography. In 1944, however, Siskind made a radical change in direction: "For the first time in my life subject matter, as such, had ceased to be of primary importance. Instead, I found myself involved in the relationships of these objects, so much so that these pictures turned out to be deeply moving and personal experiences.'" In Gloucester 1H which was made at this time, Siskind recognized not a glove, or a hand, but a relationship of form and surface rendered on a flat picture plane, a theme that he would continue to explore until his death in 1991. While Siskind's work was to grow increasingly abstract, he made no attempt to conceal his subject matter. His are all essentially "straight" photographs-sharply focused, fundamentally unmanipulated slices of the world before his eyes. Although nonnarrative in its structure, Siskind's imagery suggests both the historical past, found in the revelations of peeling and abraded surfaces, and a dynamic and energetic present that demands our attention. Nor did Siskind discourage emotional or psychological interpretations of his work. As described by Peter C. Bunnell, faculty curator of photography emeritus,"His was a pictorial achievement that helped shape a distinctly late modernist American photographic style; one that is characterized by a rigorous adherence to the essential qualities of the medium, and the making of a poetic image that is the subject re-presented as metaphor, in a specific abstract form, in order to express the inner self-the subconscious common to all men and women.'" With their frequent emphasis on bold, graphic gestures, Siskind's photographs have often been allied with the work of the Abstract Expressionists. Siskind was, in fact, close to many of the movement's most notable figures, particularly Franz Kline, and he exhibited in their circle during the 1940s and 1950s. An image like Jalapa 6 (Homage to Franz Kline) from 1973 acknowledges Siskind's friendship with Kline at the same time as it notes formal similarities that were reached through very different tactics. Siskind's photographic aesthetic developed in concert with these colleagues, rather than in response to them, and his work is better understood within the context of photographers like Alfred Stieglitz, Minor White, and, in particular, Frederick Sommer, who shared Siskind's steadfast insistence on discovering a photograph's meaning from the placement and relationship of objects within the tightly defined borders of the print itself. On the occasion of Siskind's seventy-fifth birthday, Bunnell noted,"One of the most satisfying expressions by an artist isthe versatile reflection of maturity.The ease with which the artist projects his inner strength and extends his own consciousness through his creations is his mark of genius; the achievement of an effortless will is gratifying to us all. Such isthe pleasure of Siskind's work." Through out this gallery, Siskind's insights are revealed through a rigorous and inspired eye always in search of new experience.

Collection Publications: Aaron Siskind at 100

Explore More

Celebrating American Art at Princeton

Princeton Collects

Mosaic Restaurant