Article
Newsletter: Fall 2003
Few artists have had as profound and wide-ranging an impact on their medium as has the photographer Aaron Siskind. To mark the centenary of his birth in 1903, the museum has organized an exhibition of twenty-one prints from the permanent collection, which contains one of the largest bodies of Siskind's vintage prints.
Siskind began his artistic career as a member of the Photo-League, an organization devoted to social and documentary photography. In 1944, however, he made a radical change in direction, which he described in the pages of Minicam Photography: "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 tur ned 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 ren dered 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 non narrative 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.
As Peter C. Bunnell, [former] faculty curator of photography emeritus, noted: "His was a pictorial achievement that helped shape a distinctly late mod ernist 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 represented as metaphor, in a specific abstract form, in order to express the inner self- the subconscious common to all men and women."
Siskind began his artistic career as a member of the Photo-League, an organization devoted to social and documentary photography. In 1944, however, he made a radical change in direction, which he described in the pages of Minicam Photography: "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 tur ned 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 ren dered 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 non narrative 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.
As Peter C. Bunnell, [former] faculty curator of photography emeritus, noted: "His was a pictorial achievement that helped shape a distinctly late mod ernist 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 represented as metaphor, in a specific abstract form, in order to express the inner self- the subconscious common to all men and women."
