Aaron Siskind 100.

Photographs by Aaron Siskind. Text by Robert Rauschenberg.

powerHouse Books, New York, 2003. 176 pp., 100 tritone illustrations, 10x13¼".

In 1932, at age twenty-nine, Siskind began his career as a photographer and spent the next nine years under the auspices of the New York Photo League, working on social documentary photography. Around 1940, Siskind made a shift toward abstraction and entered an art world populated by painters and sculptors. During the course of the decade, Siskind began to explore a vision that depended on the shallow plane, and utilized delicate, minimal designs. “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 relationships of these objects, so much so that the pictures turned out to be deeply moving and personal experiences.” The photograph had become the object. Siskind’s style of gesture and nuance, a new form of visual calligraphy, dominated his work for the next forty years, and ran parallel to the developments of his colleagues, the abstract expressionists. Siskind was not only a critical figure in modern photography, but also influenced the work of painters of that period, including Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline, and Robert Rauschenberg. Aaron Siskind 100, book and exhibition, honors the legacy of this legendary artist through six decades of an incredible photographic journey.

Aside from the 1982 monograph Pleasures and Terrors, a classic title that has been lamentably out-of-print for nearly twenty years, there have been no works available on this exceptional photographer. Anyone devoted to the genesis and development of abstraction in twentieth century art-encompassing all visual arts-will be thrilled to see this new, monumental book on one of photography's great artists, a man who influenced, and in turn was influenced by many of the abstract expressionists. Having begun his photographic career with the New York Photo League, in 1940 Siskind made a marked departure for abstraction. "For the first time in my life subject matter, as such, had ceased to be of primary importance," Siskind wrote. "Instead I found myself involved in the relationships of these objects, so much so that the pictures turned out to be deeply moving and personal experiences." In other words, the subject matter was the photograph itself, an approach that his contemporaries in painting mirrored. This gorgeous book, published by Blind Spot Books, suitably honors one whose work will endure.

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