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Born in New York City, Aaron Siskind created a body of photographic work that deeply impacted the development of the American avant-garde. Siskind began as a documentary photographer but would become aligned with the Abstract Expressionist movement, and his introduction of abstraction into photography was both controversial and influential.

Siskind grew up on New York’s Lower East Side, graduating from City College of New York in 1926 and going on to teach high school English for multiple decades. He became interested in photography in the early 1930s, when he was gifted a camera as a wedding gift. Soon after, Siskind joined the Film and Photo League in New York, a Communist organization, becoming part of a group of documentary photographers who were dedicated to using image-making to advance social causes. As his practice progressed, however, Siskind’s photographs became more and more abstract; by 1950, he had left his previous style of documentary imagery behind in favor of images that focused on detail, texture, and composition instead of social context. As Andy Grundberg has written, “[Siskind’s] pictures have both the traditional descriptiveness of conventional photographs and a graphic, metaphoric emotional power.”

Siskind resigned as a high school teacher in 1949, in hopes of supporting himself as a full-time photographer. This proved challenging, and Siskind moved to Chicago at the behest of his friend Harry Callahan. There, Siskind taught photography at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology, where he espoused his belief in a primarily graphic approach to the medium and served as head of his department from 1961 to 1971, during which time he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966. He joined the faculty of the Rhode Island School of Design in 1971, and taught there until retiring in 1976.

Siskind’s works have been exhibited widely, including in 38 exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, between 1941 and 2022. His photographs are included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, among others.