Aaron Siskind was born in New York City in 1903 and passed away in 1991. Siskind received his first camera as a honeymoon gift in 1929, while working as an English teacher in New York City. Ever since, he had cultivated an interest in photography, joining the Workers Film and Photo League, a filmmakers’ and photographers’collective in 1932 (later leaving in 1935). From 1936 to 1941 he was active in the reorganized Photo League, during which he established the Feature Group whose activities revolved around the issues raised by the documentary photography widely used by photographers at the Farm Security Administration and photojournalists contributing to the magazines of the time. However, Siskind had been moving steadily away from the realm of documentary realism through his architectural work, which conveyed a sense of form rather than a social message, resulting in him leaving the League in 1941. In 1949, he resigned from public school teaching and accelerated his artistic shift to abstract images. At the invitation of Harry Callahan, Siskind became a member of faculty at the Institute of Design in Chicago in 1951 as the successor to the New Bauhaus founded by László Moholy-Nagy, later becoming director of the Photographic Department in 1959. Siskind engaged his advanced students in a photographic archive project that concerned the extant buildings in Chicago designed by Louis Sullivan in the 1890s. Calling for a corpus of images in the form of series, Sisikind and his team gave isibility and status to architectural photography as a modern art form.
Siskind, who had been close to Abstract expressionist artists, was turning his attention to markings on walls, which would come to occupy a central place in his work for many years. In rejecting the third dimension, he experimented with close-ups that emphasized texture as much as object and form. The dualities in a Siskind photograph often seem to form a dialogue between two objects, two forms, or two ideas. “Homage to Franz Kline,” a photographic tribute to the abstract expressionist painter Franz Kline consists of six groups of images of walls taken in different places. The idea came to Siskind during a trip to Mexico when he stumbled upon a wall covered with random brushstrokes, and the complete series was first exhibited in Chicago in 1975.
Siskind’s solo exhibitions include, “The Photographs of Aaron Siskind,” George Eastman House (Rochester,
1965); “Aaron Siskind,” The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (2003); “Aaron Siskind: Abstractions,” The Art Institute of Chicago (2016).
