Aaron Siskind
Aaron Siskind ( born December 4, 1903 in New York; † February 8, 1991 in Providence, Rhode Iceland ) was an American photographer. He developed an abstract- expressionist photography that made him a key figure in modern American art after 1945.
Life
With the desire to become a writer, Siskind studied literature at the City University of New York. In the early 1930s he began to deal with photography. By his own admission, he received a camera as a wedding gift and discovered in the honeymoon his passion for photography. From 1932 to 1941 he was a member of the New York Workers Film and Photo League, ( from 1936 Photo League ) and dealt mainly with social documentary photography. He wrote, for example, the highly acclaimed photo essay The Harlem Document ( 1938-40 ). Similar time-critical photo series followed. From the 1940s he turned away from the narrative photography and developed an abstract lyrical imagery. He focused increasingly on surface structures and formed, for example, walls with flaked paint, stained walls, erosion, rotted wood and other inanimate objects from. In 1945 he published the photo series, The Drama of Objects in which he points to the magic of inanimate objects. His work has been called " the waste wrested art." Technically, he followed the straight photography. His pictorial compositions reached doing a painterly quality that anticipates the works of the Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning or Jackson Pollock.
From 1947 to 1949 Siskind taught photography at Trenton Junior College in New Jersey. In the summer of 1950 he taught jointly with Harry Callahan at Black Mountain College. Callahan persuaded him later, the faculty of the IIT Institute of Design, to join in Chicago ( New Bauhaus Illinois Institute of Technology). There he taught until 1959 as a professor of photography. At the time he published articles in the magazine Aperture. In 1959 he published his first book. From 1960 to 1970 he worked as co-editor of Choice Magazine. In 1963 he became a founding member of the Society for Photographic Education. Along with Harry Callahan, he taught from 1971 to 1976 photography at the Rhode Iceland School of Design in Providence. In 1984 he founded the Aaron Siskind Foundation.
Siskind died 87 years old on 8 February 1991 in Providence, Rhode Iceland.