Master the Art of Photography Aaron Siskind Style
Stop, Look, and Capture Stunning Shots – A Guide to Appreciating the Process
“If you look very intensely and slowly things will happen that you never dreamed of before.”— Aaron Siskind
Commenting on his photography beginnings Aaron Siskind remarked, “I was given a small camera as a wedding gift from a very dear friend. My first pictures were taken on my honeymoon. As soon as I became familiar with the camera, I was intrigued with the possibilities of expression it offered. It was like a discovery for me” (“Aaron Siskind,” 2024).
As I was intrigued by the same possiblity of expression that Siskind mentioned in the quote above. The serene sea from a pier in Southern California, revealed an anomoly of plant growth. . Here were plants on top of a surface they wouldn’t normally belong.
“Ah ha!” I thought to myself, a photo op, one that has a unique back drop. The plants were not growing into the air as normal plants do, they were floating on top of a light blue green surface, an aqua that signals the sea.
In an interview with Smithsonian Magazine, Siskind comments about his relationship with his parents. “I never had any real emotional attachment and certainly no intellectual relationship with them — -right from the start I was a street child.” Perhaps that explains his fondness for art found on the streets of New York City, where he was born and raised, — anything from close-ups of graffiti to ragged posters peeling off of a wall” (“Oral History,” 1982).
As a child, Siskind became interested first in poetry. He came to find poetry “painful” because he had trouble creating the right words. It wasn’t until he got married when that he showed an interest in photography, which he called a medium of immediacy — you get to see the picture right away.
Siskind moved from documentary to abstract photography after he became friends with abstract expressionist painters Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb. His interest in having primary subjects in his photographs waned. “For the first time in my life, subject matter, as such, had ceased to be of primary importance,” Siskind explained. “Instead, I found myself involved in the relationship of these objects, so much so that the pictures turned out to be deeply moving and personal experiences.”
In 1951, Siskind taught with Harry Callahan at Black Mountain College, an art college that closed in 1957. Siskind was a photography professor at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago for nearly 20 years. He photographed Chicago architecture with his students in a study of architects Adler and Sullivan and interior designer Mies van der Rohe there.
In one of the photographs from the Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation series taken in 1956 of divers in midair, only a diver is seen. There is a light-gray background throughout the frame. His right arm touches his bicep; his left is extended from his body and bent down at the elbow. He wears rolled-up jeans.
The diver’s leap has his left leg fully extended; his right is bent at the knee to extend outward toward the right edge of the frame. There are dark shadows throughout the subject, which are embedded in a solid, light-colored background.
Siskind took these photographs with a handheld twin-lens reflex camera at the Lake Michigan shoreline. The title of the series suggests that the divers experience both pleasure and terror while they are suspended in midair.
Create a Siskind
It’s not only divers who take to the sky, street performers frequently launch rocket-like off their feet.
If you go to the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the scene is alive with performers. This is the place to catch airborne street dancers. Hollywood, California is another option for street performance photo ops where people break dance often leaping high off the ground.
Emulating Siskind’s art is an easy process using the Quick Actions Panel:
After opening the photo in Photoshop 2024, duplicate it by selecting Layer>Duplicate Layer.
In the new layer, select the subject then opt for Select>Inverse to isolate the background. using your choice of selection tools. (I use the Polygonal Lasso Tool set at 2px.)
Open Actions Panel by clicking on Window>Actions
In the Quick Actions Panel, opt for changing the background to white.
Found Art
One of the newer elements of art today is called found art. In essence, found art is art that can be anything you’ve encountered in your environment, from a collection of small bits of trash you’d find on the street to part of a wall whose peeling paint reveals something older underneath.
Centuries ago, artists often painted something on a canvas, decided they didn’t like it, and then painted a new painting over it. Sometimes over a long period, a painting gets worn, eventually showing the work underneath. When this happens, it’s called pentimento.
Much of the found art that Siskind worked with is related to the concept of pentimento in the art world. Siskind often framed chipped paint or torn playbills that revealed something different underneath. He shot the walls with this found art when he saw patterns he liked — patterns that looked like abstract paintings. To Siskind, photography had no requirement to represent persons, places, or things
No graffiti is as historical as that on the Berlin Wall. The pentimento-like effect is very evident in the scrawl on the wall.
Peeling paint showing the exposed wall shows multiple layers of graffiti over the nearly thirty years the wall existed. Pieces of it are now public art at Checkpoint Charley.
Architecture Close-Ups
Siskind made abstract works from architecture by framing parts of a building so that its shape and form are almost unrecognizable. Close-ups of mid-century modern architecture often end up as repetitious patterns of different materials. Since this type of architecture usually is constructed from concrete, glass, steel, or fiberglass, the effect is dramatic.
Above, is a section of a mid-century modern building in LA. The simplicity of the repeating concrete slabs had me questioning just how engineers and architects can be so incredibly accurate in their designs.
Adept communication with genius construction workers led to what you see in the image. It’s truly an incredible feat of humankind, yet so few people passing by appreciate it.
What is Abstract Expressionism?
Did Siskind learn abstract expressionism from painters or was it the other way around? Siskind and other photographers and abstract expressionists belonged to the New York School, a group of artists who put their soul into their art, creating patterns, shapes, and objects along with amorphous forms juxtaposed according to the artists’ feelings. They included such artists as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Adolph Gottlieb.
Many artists, including Siskind, moved away from social realism — the recording of social turmoil associated with the Great Depression — to abstract art, which some say offered an escape from social realities. Probably the biggest influence on these American artists is what they saw in European art, which made its way to New York in the early ’30s, shortly after the Museum of Modern Art opened in 1929.
The art form began as the artists replicated primitive forms and ended with their works becoming art events in which every inch of the canvas was covered with something, seemingly meaningless to some and quasi-religious to others.
Other photographers whose work lent a hand to the abstract art movement were Frederick Sommer and Ralph Eugene Meatyard.
Today this concept can be seen in the Los Angeles subway if you frame a design in one of the stations so that it looks as if disparate elements fit together abstractly. With a photo, the object switches to two-dimensional, and it can take a long time to figure out what it is.
Takeaway
Aaron Siskind began his working life teaching English. He went on to become a master photographer after a relative gave him a camera. His eye saw subjects and objects not as they existed, but as he shaped them. You can create abstract shots that go beyond what the eye normally sees by carefully framing close-ups of graffiti, architecture, or multi-textured surfaces from walls to roads.
References
Oral history interview with Aaron Siskind (1982). Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-aaron-siskind-13045
Aaron Siskind. (n.d.) https://thejewishmuseum.org/collection/artist/aaron-siskind-american-1903-1991
Siskind, Aaron. (2022). https://collections.mocp.org/detail.php?t=objects&type=browse&f=maker&s=Siskind%2C+Aaron&record=20