SISKIND, AARON

SISKIND, AARON (1903–1991), U.S. photographer and teacher. Born in New York City, he attended City College of New York, where he graduated with a degree in literature in 1926. Siskind then taught English in New York public schools, only taking up photography as a pastime. In 1930, he joined the Photo League, a group of photographers who confirmed their solidarity with the political far left by creating documentary photos with social content. Under their auspices, Siskind produced photos of Harlem and of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, among other subjects. As the head of the Feature Group of the League, Siskind and others created the Harlem Document (1937–40), recording the overcrowded African-American New York neighborhood in a push for social justice. During the 1940s, Siskind's work reflected a growing interest in photographing natural objects from a close perspective, which lent his images an abstract quality only hinted at in his earlier documentary photographs. Organic material, such as leaves, or social detritus, such as defaced walls, muddied papers, weathered woods, and rusted metals, occupied Siskind's pictoral interest in their flatness and reservoir of rich indexical detail, like shadows, smudges, and graffiti. Between 1947 and 1951, he exhibited frequently at the Charles Egan Gallery, where many of the Abstract Expressionists exhibited. Siskind himself is considered one of the only Abstract Expressionists working in photography. He taught at Black Mountain College in 1951, and then at the Illinois Institute of Technology in   Chicago between 1951 and 1971, where he became director of the department of photography. In 1959, he published his first book Aaron Siskind: Photographs. Between 1971 and 1976, he taught at the Rhode Island School of Design. He was a founder and member of the Society for Photographic Education and the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, New York. He received many prestigious awards, including a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Governor's Prize for the Arts, Rhode Island. His work is in the collections of numerous institutions, including the Eastman House Museum, Getty Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. His work has been exhibited at many museums and galleries, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Jewish Museum, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Modern Art. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Aaron Siskind, Photographer (1965), incl. bibl.; D. Anfram, Abstract Expressionism (1990); M. Kozloff, New York: Capital of Photography (2002). (Nancy Buchwald (2nd ed.)