Dublin Core
Title
Backyard, Harlem, 1940
Creator
Siskind, Aaron
photographer
1903 - 1991
American
Date
1940; printed 1981
Type
photograph; gelatin silver print
work
Medium
gelatin silver print
photographic paper
photography (process); gelatin silver process
Extent
35.56 x 27.94 cm (14 x 11 inches)
27.94 x 19.69 cm (11 x 7 3/4 inches)
Identifier
2017.012.003
2017.012.003
2017.012.003
Rights
Copyright. 1940. Estate of Aaron Siskind
Description
Satirically titled "Harlem Backyard," this photograph possibly depicts the bottom of an air shaft of a Harlem apartment building. Two, white sheets dry on a clothesline at the center of the shaft. A line of white shirts hang at a lower altitude above what seems to be a wooden fence. The floor of the air shaft is completely caked in litter and garbage.
Aaron Siskind
margin, verso
Backyard, Harlem, 1940, "HD"
verso [in pencil, in unknown hand]
Banks, Ann, and Charles Traub, eds. Harlem Document: Photographs 1932-1940: Aaron Siskind, p.41. Providence: Matrix Publication, 1981.
Aaron Siskind was born on December 4, 1903, in New York City. He attended City College, earning his BSS in Literature in 1926. After college, he taught English in the New York City public school system from 1926 to 1947. In 1929, he married Sidonie Glaller, and received his first camera as a wedding gift. Throughout the 1930s, he was active in the New York Photo League and formed Feature Group, a documentary production unit as a part of the Photo League School. The photographs produced by Siskind and his associates were published as ‘The Feature Group’ in Photo Notes in 1940, most of them featuring scenes of city life. In the 1940s, Siskind developed ties with several New York School artists, and his work became increasingly abstract and symbolic. In 1945, he published ‘The Drama of Objects’, a series of photographs featuring compositions comprised of objects he found around Martha’s Vineyard, MA. During this period and into the 1950s, his work was regularly exhibited in New York City, particularly at the Charles Egan Gallery. In addition to his ongoing photography career, Siskind taught photography at Trenton Junior College in New Jersey from 1947 to 1949; the Illinois Institute of Technology, Institute of Design in Chicago from 1951 to 1971, also serving as head of the Photographic Department from 1959 to 1971; and the Rhode Island School of Design from 1971 to 1976. He had a close connection with fellow photographer Harry Callahan, whom he met while teaching at Black Mountain College in the summer of 1951; the two taught and worked together for most of Siskind’s later career. From 1960 to 1970, he served as co-editor of Choice Magazine. He was a founding member of both the Society for Photographic Education and the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York and served as a board member for the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Chicago. He maintained an active photography career until his death in Providence, Rhode Island in February, 1991.
Subject
cities; laundry; apartment houses; tenement houses; black-and-white photographs
Source
http://www.howardgreenberg.com/; http://aaronsiskind.org/chronology.html
Publisher
Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, State University of New York at New Paltz (New Paltz, New York, United States)
Photography Collection. Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art
Relation
http://hvvacc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/sdma/id/5076
Coverage
contemporary (generic time frame)
Contemporary (style of art)
Photo League of New York
Provenance
Estate of Tennyson Schad
Gift of Howard and Ellen Greenberg
Artwork Item Type Metadata
URL
http://hvvacc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/sdma/id/5076