Aaron Siskind

Photo League

According to the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography, Siskind studied literature and worked as an English teacher in New York public schools.A camera given to him to document his honeymoon led him into serious photography in the early 1930s, and he joined the Film and Photo League amid the social conditions of the Great Depression. Photography began for him as a collective practice for recording and sharing social experience before it became a vehicle for formal experiment.^*1 In a Smithsonian oral history recorded in 1982 and lasting more than three hours, Siskind reflects on his New York childhood, his interest in poetry before photography, the evolution of his work, and his relationships with Abstract Expressionist painters. His background as a literature teacher and reader of poetry helps explain why metaphor and association in the wall photographs cannot be reduced to imitation of abstract painting. As language can lead one thing toward another meaning, Siskind sought to make photographs in which an actual wall or scar could operate beyond the name of the object depicted.^*29

ICP records Siskind’s entry into the League in 1933 and his work on Harlem Document from 1937 to 1940. The Photo League was a left-oriented educational and production organization that aimed to address contemporary social conditions through photography, and Siskind’s early work was tied to that institutional purpose.^*2 MoMA’s holdings include both the Harlem work and later abstractions under the same artist, reflecting the way current art history treats the two periods as parts of one career.^*3

Harlem Document

Harlem Document depended on production meetings as well as finished photographs. Minutes from the Feature Group discussed by The Photographers’ Gallery record members reviewing results together and reshooting assignments when necessary. Siskind’s later connection between clarity of thought and feeling and clarity in a photograph is easier to understand against this discipline of collective review than as a matter of individual intuition alone.^*27 MoMA’s account of Apollo Theatre identifies Harlem Document as a collaborative Photo League Feature Group project and notes that later publications incorporated interviews from the Federal Writers’ Project and writing by Ralph Ellison.^*4 In Savoy Dancers, dancing bodies, the crowd, and interior light create a strong visual rhythm in addition to any social-documentary information.^*5 Content and form were already inseparable in Siskind’s early documentary work.

Harlem Document did not fix its subjects into a single image of “poverty.” It combined photographs of housing, churches, leisure, streets, and interiors with interviews and writing, seeking a structure that would resist reducing the neighborhood to one type. As MoMA notes in relation to later reconstructions that included Federal Writers’ Project interviews and writing by Ralph Ellison, meaning here was produced through sequence and editing as well as through individual photographs.^*4 Because Harlem Document later became widely known through publications associated with Siskind alone, its original collaborative structure has to be restored. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston notes that the project developed as a cultural study undertaken by the Feature Group under Siskind together with Black sociologist Michael Carter and led to the 1939 exhibition Toward a Harlem Document.^*23 The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Harlem Nightclub Stripper II is likewise cataloged as part of the “Photo League Feature Group project Harlem Document.” Siskind’s beginnings become clearer when strong individual images are viewed together with the project structure through which multiple participants studied a neighborhood.^*22

The Library of Congress holds a thirty-print portfolio drawn from Harlem Document and Most Crowded Block. The fact that projects from the 1930s were reedited decades later into portfolios and books also shows that the image of “early Siskind” familiar today was shaped by later selection and republication.^*21 A fuller account of the Photo League’s social commitment also has to address the position from which its photographers worked. The Jewish Museum notes that many young photographers who shared the League’s socialist ideals in the 1930s were first-generation Jewish Americans who brought cameras into New York neighborhoods. Sid Grossman asked students to consider their own relation to the situations they photographed along with the subject before the lens. That movement from “documenting” society toward examining the photographer’s own position provides an important continuity with the increasingly subjective images Siskind later made.^*30 Harlem Document also raises the question of who held the position of representation. The catalog The Radical Camera gives Maurice Berger’s essay the title “Harlem Document, Race and the Photo League,” treating race and the League as a distinct critical problem. Siskind and his colleagues did work with Black sociologist Michael Carter and studied the neighborhood collectively, but collaboration alone does not make their viewpoint identical to one articulated from within Harlem. Keeping social mission, collective production, and the photographers’ outsider position visible allows the early work to be read on its own terms and prevents its absorption into a prehistory of later abstraction.^*31

Walls and Traces of Reality

The Art Institute of Chicago’s archive records Siskind’s growing interest in the “drama of objects” during the 1940s, his close photographs of urban surfaces and architectural fragments, and his relationships with Abstract Expressionist painters.^*6 In architectural photographs such as the museum’s Walker Warehouse, he documented a Louis Sullivan building as historical evidence while also treating ornament and wall patterns as flattened compositions.^*7 His attachment to specific places and materials did not disappear when his work moved toward abstraction.

Abstract Expressionism

As SFMOMA’s discussion of Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation explains, Siskind selected from many exposures those frames in which contextual information recedes and a jumping body appears to float against white space. The “pleasures” and “terrors” named by the series emerge from posture just before descent and from the emptiness of the frame; biography and event narrative recede.^*8 In the SFMOMA print, almost no information identifies the place around the figure, and the dark body begins to read like a graphic sign.^*9 Yet that shape was not drawn; it resulted from a photograph stopping an actual jump, and this factual tie separates the image from complete pictorial abstraction. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Chicago brings the camera close to scars and layers of paint on a wall, presenting urban architecture first as a material surface, with maplike or panoramic description stripped away.^*10 In such works, the less the photograph explains about place, the more strongly traces of time, repair, and wear become visible. Reading this shift as an abandonment of social concern obscures what Siskind continued to photograph. His subjects remained actual urban walls, signs, ropes, peeling surfaces, and architectural ornament—things transformed by human use and by time. As names and locational cues recede, marks left by painting, stripping, repair, and neglect move to the front of the image. The Art Institute of Chicago’s emphasis on a “drama of objects” points to this continuity.^*6

Photography itself becomes central here. A painter can invent an abstract form; Siskind first had to find a form that existed in the world. Framing extracts part of it and the print flattens it, yet the photograph retains an indexical relation to the wall, scar, or lettering that was actually there. This double status explains how his pictures could approach postwar painting without becoming identical to it. Treating the abstraction of the 1940s as a simple flight from political documentary into art therefore hides a compositional problem already present in the earlier work. In Harlem Document, storefronts, interiors, dancing bodies, and walls operated as social information and as arrangements of line, repetition, and density. The Photographers’ Gallery likewise points to formal seeds of the later abstract work within the early documentary photographs.^*27 The relationship to Abstract Expressionism cannot be reduced to finding similar black shapes. In the Smithsonian oral history, Siskind speaks about his relationships with painters including Mark Rothko and what those connections might mean for his work. Smith College Museum also discusses his friendships with Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, and Rothko, as well as Homage to Franz Kline. In postwar New York, painting and photography were each testing gesture, flatness, improvisation, and material trace through their own medium. Siskind’s connection to Abstract Expressionism is more accurately understood through those shared contemporary questions.^*32

Walls, Architecture, and the Body

In another Chicago photograph, peeling paint and dark forms move across the frame like brushstrokes.^*11 Siskind’s importance lies less in reproducing the appearance of Abstract Expressionism than in extracting forms already present on city walls and allowing photography’s factual bond to the world to coexist with a painterly surface. A photograph such as West Street similarly strips away most street information and brings wall, lettering, and scars onto nearly the same plane.^*12 The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s The Structure of Photographic Metaphors discusses Siskind while examining how photographs can depict concrete subjects and simultaneously evoke other ideas.^*13 Photographic metaphor, in this sense, does not erase reality into abstraction; it allows another reading to emerge from an existing trace.

Series and Teaching

Numbered works such as No. 37 in Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation belong to a series that repeats similar conditions so differences can register from one image to the next.^*14 SUNY New Paltz likewise positions Siskind’s walls, signs, and material traces at the meeting point of abstraction and photography’s specific relation to reality.^*15

His exchanges with Abstract Expressionist painters also resist a one-way model of influence. Siskind’s photographs can recall the brushwork of Franz Kline, yet his close attention to urban surfaces also continues the observational habits of the Photo League years. As the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s account of photographic metaphor suggests, concrete things in Siskind’s images remain concrete even as they evoke other ideas.^*13 In his 1950 “Credo,” Siskind described wanting to detach the photograph from the confusion of events in the world and make it into a new, self-contained object with its own order. The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents New York 2 as a key to understanding the wall photographs he made from the 1940s onward. The movement from photographs that explain “what place this is” toward photographs that operate as ordered objects within the frame was central to his abstraction.^*24

Social Documentary and Abstraction

A Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation print in the RISD Museum also reflects Siskind’s institutional connection to the Rhode Island School of Design, where he taught from 1971.^*16 The National Gallery of Art’s online collection includes many Siskind works, showing that his method of isolating actual surfaces continued into later life, from city walls to volcanic lava.^*17

The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago’s Photographers of the New Bauhaus situates the Institute of Design within a teaching lineage that crossed experiment, visual form, and technology. Siskind began teaching there in 1951 and, with Harry Callahan and others, helped make photographic education an important laboratory in postwar America.^*18 Siskind’s relationship with Harry Callahan becomes clearer through this teaching history. Smith College Museum compares their reduction of familiar subjects until line and tonal contrast can make the object difficult to identify. As colleagues at the Institute of Design, they did not teach a single formula for “abstract photography” so much as share a discipline of sustained looking, changing distance, light, and framing to test what photography could do.^*32

Rereading Collaboration

A 1956 Aperture discussion of the Institute of Design presents photography as something learned through acts of looking and experiment, without treating established aesthetic rules as a fixed template.^*19 Getty materials on the Institute of Design similarly trace how the school, descending from the New Bauhaus, trained multiple generations of photographers.^*20 Siskind’s position in photographic history cannot be captured by the story of an artist who “switched” from social documentary to abstraction. He retained photography’s capacity to record concrete things while reducing contextual information and concentrating attention on form, scars, lettering, and repetition, sustaining that method in both his work and his teaching. His long career as an educator transformed a personal way of seeing into a training in how to look. At the Institute of Design, students were encouraged to test the same subject through changes in light, distance, surface, and repetition, making sustained visual inquiry the basis of an exercise rather than conventional “beauty.” Aperture’s 1956 presentation of the school as a site of experiment confirms the priority given to visual inquiry over imitation of finished works.^*19

The later reception of Harlem Document is complicated by the way a collaborative body of work was reedited as a major work by Siskind alone. The Library of Congress portfolio record groups thirty images from Harlem Document and Most Crowded Block, providing a basis for distinguishing the collective Photo League activity of the 1930s from the later construction of Siskind as an individual artist.^*21 The Jewish Museum documents the Feature Group’s collective production of Portrait of a Tenement, Dead End: The Bowery, Park Avenue North and South, and Harlem Document, followed by Siskind’s turn toward individual work after 1941. His movement toward abstraction is more coherently understood as a growing concentration on how meaning is produced within a single photograph after he left the context of collaborative reportage than as a loss of interest in society.^*25 In Chicago, Siskind photographed walls and also people diving from the lakeshore as abstract forms. In Diver 68 from Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation, the body against the sky becomes almost like a letter or sign, joining the lines he had found on city walls to the posture of a human figure.^*26

In his 1950 “Credo,” Siskind wrote of making the photograph into an ordered object independent of the world’s change and confusion. As the Metropolitan Museum’s discussion of New York 2 indicates, that idea directly informs his close photographs of wall lettering, paint, weathering, and debris.^*24 Later museum exhibitions and photobooks, however, have often presented Harlem Document as an early masterpiece by Siskind alone. Scholarship on the Photo League argues that an artist-centered museum framework cannot fully account for collaboration with neighborhood organizations or for the politics of a “document” produced by multiple photographers. Any assessment of Siskind therefore has to retain both the formal strength of individual images and the social project built through collective research.^*28 This critical reassessment also affects how continuity with the abstract photographs is understood. If the early work is treated only as a stage before Siskind became a “great abstract photographer,” the Photo League’s concern with neighborhood research, interviews, and collective editing disappears. If the later work is dismissed as an abandonment of the social, his continued observation of actual walls and lettering disappears instead. The two periods need to be distinguished by their different systems of production while still being read for the continuities between them.^*28