Aaron Siskind (Artist/Photographer, 1903 to 1991)
Aaron Siskind was the most important and influential practitioner of abstract photography in the United States. As the photographer and photo historian Carl Chiarenza noted, “His development as a photographer paralleled the development of the abstract expressionist painters, many of whom were his close friends.” Siskind began his career in the 1930s producing a powerful series of documentary images entitled “Harlem Document.” During the 1940s he shifted focus and pioneered a symbolic style based on selecting forms from nature and city life, which he composed in flat planes with bold geometric compositions. A photographer-cum-artist who fully integrated the modernist pictorial vocabulary, his goal was to make each photograph “an object that confronts you, not an object that you’re just looking at.”
Information courtesy of Swann Galleries Inc., October 2003