Although he began his career as a documentarian, Aaron Siskind quickly became known for photographs that concerned themselves with exploring internal formal relationships rather than depicting recognizable objects. Active in the artistic milieu of postwar New York, Siskind made photographs in dialogue with the work of the Abstract Expressionist painters, with whom he was socially and professionally close. He sought to find a new language for photographic depiction that could transcend what was in front of the camera. “First, and emphatically,” he wrote in 1950, “I accept the flat plane of the picture surface as the primary frame of reference of the picture.” Siskind’s radically abstract photographs of walls covered with graffiti, chalk, or peeling paint and paper would be recognized as a pioneering development in 20th-century photography.
Date
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Katz, Vincent. 2002. “Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art.” Exh. cat. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia/Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. p. 174.
Madrid, Spain, Ministerio de Educacion y Cultura, Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia, “Black Mountain College: Experimenting with Power,” October 22, 2002 - January 13, 2003.
Houston, Texas, Museum of Fine Arts, “Aaron Siskind 100,” July 3-September 26, 2004; previously traveled to The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California, September 30, 2001-January 6, 2002; Zoellner Arts Center, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, January 29-March 16, 2003; Center for Creative Photography, Tuscon, Arizona, March 8-July 6, 2003; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College, Chicago, Illinois, July 25-September 8, 2003; Madison Art Center, Madison, Wisconsin, September 6, 2003-January 4, 2004; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey, September 9-November 9, 2003; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio, September 13-November 19, 2003; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, October 15, 2003-January 4, 2004; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, New York, October 15, 2003-January 4, 2004; Hanmi Museum of Photography, Seoul, Korea, November 1-December 13, 2003; The RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island, November 14, 2003-January 25, 2004.
Art Institute of Chicago, “Aaron Siskind: Abstractions,” April 16-August 14, 2016.
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