“If you look very intensely and slowly, things will happen that you never dreamed of before.”
- Aaron Siskind
Photography for me has always been something I just did. I can’t recall how many times I got in trouble as a child for stealing my fathers SLR. Taking what, to him, seemed like ludicrous photos of peeling paint or cracks in the pavement. However, it wasn’t until I discovered the work of Aaron Siskind that I realized how powerful and provocative these abstract images could actually be.
From the Phaidon 55 book on Siskind:
“Aaron Siskind’s towering presence in the landscape of twentieth-century American photography rises from two foundations of accomplishment and influence – his art and his teaching. Beginning in the early 1930s and continuing until his death at eighty-seven in 1991, his copious production of varied and highly creative images created a legacy of original vision which eventually obliterated whatever line might still have seemed to segregate photography and painting in the 1940s and 1950s… Siskind’s manner of zooming in on visual details and fragments in ways that explored gesture and shape but that had little to do with the nominal subject matter in front of the camera clearly made him a brother in the family of
Abstract Expressionism.”
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