Boys in Empty Tenement, Harlem, 1937

Boys in Empty Tenement, Harlem, 1937

Siskind, Aaron

photographer

1903 - 1991

American

1937; printed 1981

photograph; gelatin silver print

work

gelatin silver print

photographic paper

photography (process); gelatin silver process

35.56 x 27.94 cm (14 x 11 inches)

23.18 x 18.42 cm (9 1/8 x 7 1/4 inches)

2017.012.005

2017.012.005

2017.012.005

Copyright. 1937. Estate of Aaron Siskind

A group of boys play in and outside of a boarded up tenement building. One boy, his face cast in shadow, looks down from the second story window at the boys on the first story ledge below. Both of these boys face the window, which is slatted with wooden boards, in conversation with someone inside. A small hand reaches out of the window and grazes the leg of the standing boy. The front door of the building is entirely boarded up; the warning “DANGE. KEEOU [sic]” is written in large, scraggly handwriting on the scrap wood.

Aaron Siskind

margin, verso

Boys in Empty Tenement, Harlem, 1937, "HD"

verso [in pencil, in unknown hand]

Banks, Ann, and Charles Traub, eds. Harlem Document: Photographs 1932-1940: Aaron Siskind, p. 31. 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.

cities; apartment houses; tenement houses; black-and-white photographs

http://www.howardgreenberg.com/; http://aaronsiskind.org/chronology.html

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

http://hvvacc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/sdma/id/5074

contemporary (generic time frame)

Contemporary (style of art)

Photo League of New York

Estate of Tennyson Schad

Gift of Howard and Ellen Greenberg

http://hvvacc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/sdma/id/5074