Artworks

AARON SISKIND (American, 1903-1991) 

Aaron Siskind was a photographer and educator, best known for revolutionizing photography by highlighting its abstract potential. 

Siskind was born in New York in 1903. He worked as a high school English teacher for over 20 years before pursuing a career as a documentary photographer in the New York Photo League. His early work focused on social issues, particularly labor practices in the United States. However, Siskind’s photography quickly turned towards abstraction, as he began capturing close-up images of architecture and everyday objects, removing them from their context and presenting the range of their aesthetic potential. It was with these more conceptual images that Siskind amassed a following and became the only photographic member of the American Abstract-Expressionist movement. Siskind became a professor in, and later the head of, the photography department at Chicago’s Institute of Design. He won several honors and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, and continued to exhibit his work until his death in 1991.  Siskind’s photographs remain in the permanent collections of several institutions worldwide, including the Getty Center in Los Angeles, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo.