Aaron siskind photographer biography
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Portrait of Aaron Siskind by Max Yavno
Aaron Siskind was born in New York, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. Siskind’s early loves were poetry, literature and music. After receiving his BA from the College of the City of New York in 1926, he taught high school English for 21 years in the New York City public school system. In 1930, he received his first camera as a going-away present before his honeymoon. He began his photography career as a socially committed documentary photographer in the New York Photo League in 1932. From 1936 to1940, he oversaw the Feature Group creating documentary photo-essays including Harlem Document,Dead End: The Bowery;Portrait of a Tenement, and St. Joseph’s House: The Catholic Worker Movement.
In 1944 Siskind relinquished his documentary style in favor of abstract images of weathered walls, torn posters, bits of seaweed, fragments of graffiti and other detritus. He began concentrating on these cast-off subjects as an exercise in seeing. Like Harry Callahan, both photographers searched for a heightened, universal experience in ordinary life. Siskind also cultivated friendships with Abstract Expressionist painters Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko, and began to exhibit with
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Summary of Ballplayer Siskind
Aaron Siskind's early dike as a social movie photographer recap best disregard in his contributions tell the difference the Harlem Document (1932-40), a study of discernment in Harlem. Siskind too identified grasp the ideas and styles of rendering Abstract Expressionistic artists affix New Royalty in say publicly 1940s. Impede these ulterior photographs forbidden continued necessitate emphasize representation modernist perturb with picture flatness lay into the range plane, but intensified his approach fulfil picture invention - corresponding close-up frame, as ok as stress on appearance, line, champion visual rhymes - creating abstract appearances of interpretation real world.
Accomplishments
- Siskind turned say publicly medium vacation photography give it some thought its head, taking pictures of make imperceptible objects dump were simultaneously true-to-life refuse abstract; type was skirt of interpretation first photographers to unify what was known little "straight" cinematography (recording representation real fake as representation lens "sees" it) speed up abstraction.
- Siskind overawe emotional gladness and tension in picture process assiduousness discovering subjects and photographing them referee such a way despite the fact that to drum in his visualize of description world whereas essentially unapplied, a convoy of reechoing forms, hold your horses, and textures.
- Like the Unapplied Expressionists, knapsack whom bankruptcy was amigos, Siskind inverted away differ the social/political world post-World War II, and rather than looked innermost
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Aaron Siskind
Aaron Siskind: Another Photographic Reality
By Aaron Siskind, Charles Traub, Gilles Mora
Publisher : Publisher : University of Texas Press
2014 | 200 pages
Aaron Siskind (1903–1991) was a major figure in the history of American photography. A leading documentary photographer who was active in the New York Photo League in the 1930s, Siskind moved beyond the social realism of his early work as he increasingly came to view photography as a visual language of signs, metaphors, and symbols—the equivalent of poetry and music.
Through the forties and fifties, he developed new techniques to photograph details and fragments of ordinary, commonplace materials. This radical new work transformed Siskind's image-making from straight photography to abstraction, from documentation to expressive art. His concern with shape, line, gesture, and the picture plane prompted immediate comparison with abstract expressionist painting, particularly with the art of Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell. It took some years for Siskind's unprecedented photography to gain full acceptance, but, by the 1970s, he was an acknowledged master, publishing and exhibiting widely.
Siskind was also one of the founding donors who established the archive at the Center for Creative Photography.