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Oral history interview with Aaron Siskind, 1982 September 28-October 2

Transcript

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Aaron Siskind on September 28 and October 2, 1982. The interview took place at his studio in New York, New York, and was conducted by Barbara Shikler as part of the Mark Rothko and His Times Oral History Project for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Funding was provided by the Mark Rothko Foundation.

The reader should bear in mind that he or she is reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose.

Interview

BARBARA SHIKLER: Tuesday, September 28th, interview in the New York Studio, with Aaron Siskind, 876 Broadway. Let's begin at the beginning, if you would, although you have been over this ground many times before. Your date of birth is December 4, 1902. And, in New York City.

AARON SISKIND: Right. Right.

MS. SHIKLER: Whereabouts in New York City?

MR. SISKIND: The Lower East Side, way down. I think it was on Madison Street that I was born. And my parents had come over

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Portrait of Aaron Siskind by Max Yavno

Aaron Siskind was born in New York, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. Siskind’s early loves were poetry, literature and music. After receiving his BA from the College of the City of New York in 1926, he taught high school English for 21 years in the New York City public school system. In 1930, he received his first camera as a going-away present before his honeymoon. He began his photography career as a socially committed documentary photographer in the New York Photo League in 1932. From 1936 to1940, he oversaw the Feature Group creating documentary photo-essays including Harlem Document,Dead End: The Bowery;Portrait of a Tenement, and St. Joseph’s House: The Catholic Worker Movement.

In 1944 Siskind relinquished his documentary style in favor of abstract images of weathered walls, torn posters, bits of seaweed, fragments of graffiti and other detritus. He began concentrating on these cast-off subjects as an exercise in seeing. Like Harry Callahan, both photographers searched for a heightened,

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Summary of Aaron Siskind

Aaron Siskind's early work as a social documentary photographer is best seen in his contributions to the Harlem Document (1932-40), a survey of life in Harlem. Siskind also identified with the ideas and styles of the Abstract Expressionist artists in New York in the 1940s. In these later photographs he continued to emphasize the modernist concern with the flatness of the picture plane, but intensified his approach to picture making - with close-up framing, as well as emphasis on texture, line, and visual rhymes - creating abstract images of the real world.

Accomplishments

Siskind turned the medium of photography on its head, taking pictures of found objects that were simultaneously true-to-life and abstract; he was one of the first photographers to combine what was known as "straight" photography (recording the real world as the lens "sees" it) with abstraction.
Siskind found emotional joy and tension in the process of discovering subjects and photographing them in such a way as to emphasize his reading of the world as essentially abstract, a seri