Photo: Pleasure and Terrors of Levitation 99, 1961 © Aaron Siskind Foundation. Special thanks to the Bruce Silverstein Gallery.
Aaron Siskind began his foray into photography when he received a camera for a wedding gift and began taking pictures of his honeymoon. He began his career in the 1930s as a documentary photographer, joining the New York Photo League, producing “Harlem Document,” a lyrical portrait of the neighborhood taken as the sun set over the Harlem Renaissance.
For many, the transition was extreme, and Siskind, better than anyone at the time working in photography, understood this. Through his work, Siskind came to view photography as a visual language of signs, metaphors, and symbols—the equivalent of poetry and music. At a time when the photography seemed to be reduced to mere journalism and fashion photography to sell picture magazines and newspapers, Siskind radicalized the medium by making the photograph the end itself.
Chicago Nude, 1957 © Aaron Siskind Foundation. Special thanks to the Bruce Silverstein Gallery.
In celebration of his life’s work, Aaron Siskind: Another Photographic Reality (University of Texas Press) presents the first complete retrospective in print, highlighting rarely published bodies of work from Harlem; from Bucks County architecture; and from the “Tabernacle,” “Gloucester,” “Martha’s Vineyard,” “Louis Sullivan,” and “Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation” photo series. The book also includes an introduction by Gilles Mora, an expert on modern American photography, and texts by critic and photographer Charles Traub.
Harlem Document (Woman and Child), 1940 © Aaron Siskind Foundation. Special thanks to the Bruce Silverstein Gallery.
As Traub writes, “Aaron loved energy: people in motion, big cities with neighborhoods where ordinary people interacted and shared a community. At heart, his great abstract work came from the same source as his earlier prewar work, the Harlem Document: his need to record life. In essence, his visual search was for the organic roots of what is left behind. Whether a woman sitting in a chair in a New York tenement, or the scratched out graffiti on a Mexican wall, or the branches of an ageless tree on Martha’s Vineyard, he recorded the evidence of the timeless growth and change of all things, which for him became his rhythm.”
Harlem Document (Savory Ballroom), 1935 © Aaron Siskind Foundation. Special thanks to the Bruce Silverstein Gallery.
Indeed, the photographs of Aaron Siskind reveal that life is a series of syncopated beats, of visual flows of energy captured in black, white, and grey. Siskind used the camera to capture the pure, visceral essence of sight, of the eye’s ability to hone in on a single detail that, without context, becomes a meditation of the interplay between dark and light, reminding us that all we see is but a dream organized into (what we can only hope to be) coherent thoughts.
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
