Aaron Siskind
American, 1903–1991
Chicago 21
INV-2951
Aaron Siskind
American, 1903–19911952
Chicago 21
Aaron Siskind American, 1903–1991 →photographygelatin silver (developing-out-paper) pr
Date
1952
Medium
Gelatin silver print
Dimensions
Image/paper: 41.6 × 33.4 cm (16 7/16 × 13 3/16 in.); Mount: 55.9 × 45.7 cm (22 1/16 × 18 in.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Gift of Mr. Noah Goldowsky
Although he began his career as a documentarian, Aaron Siskind quickly became known for photographs that concerned themselves with exploring internal formal relationships rather than depicting recognizable objects. Active in the artistic milieu of postwar New York, Siskind made photographs in dialogue with the work of the Abstract Expressionist painters, with whom he was socially and professionally close. He sought to find a new language for photographic depiction that could transcend what was in front of the camera. “First, and emphatically,” he wrote in 1950, “I accept the flat plane of the picture surface as the primary frame of reference of the picture.” Siskind’s radically abstract photographs of walls covered with graffiti, chalk, or peeling paint and paper would be recognized as a pioneering development in 20th-century photography.
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