Reasserting the Picture Plane

More often than not Aaron Siskind is left out of the many photography books about the great photographers of the 20th century. This is a shame because to me Aaron Siskind was an outstanding creative photographer who deserves a spot among the best. He befriended and enjoyed the company of many other great artists including his best friend and colleague Harry Callahan. Although Siskind started out in documentary photography in the 1930s his work became more introspective and abstract during the 1940s-1950s. From the mid-1940s onward, everything in the general attitude of the abstract expressionist painters toward art and life fuelled an echoing ambition in Siskind. When they declared: "To us, art is an adventure into an unknown wolrd... This world of imagination is fancy free and violently opposed to common sense... We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for the flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth" they offered Siskind a formal thematic path matching his own inner concerns at a time when he was seeking an alternative to documentary photography. It is this alternative path that Siskind took that has inspired me to create this project.