Lady and Lamp, Harlem, 1940

5079

Dublin Core

Title

Lady and Lamp, 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 20.32 cm (11 x 8 inches)

Identifier

2017.012.009
2017.012.009
2017.012.009

Rights

Copyright. 1940. Estate of Aaron Siskind

Description

A young woman sits on an armchair with her legs drawn up underneath her and her arms outstretched onto the armrests at her side. She is dressed in a fitted suit jacket and skirt with a large floral corsage tucked into her lapel. Her position and distant gaze suggest that she is either disinterested or unaware of the of the photographer. A lamp with a fringed lampshade is centered directly behind the woman and the armchair.

Aaron Siskind
margin, verso
Lady and Lamp, Harlem, 1940, "HD"
verso [in pencil, in unknown hand]
Banks, Ann, and Charles Traub, eds. Harlem Document: Photographs 1932-1940: Aaron Siskind, p. 72. 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; portrait; black-and-white photographs; apartment house

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/5079

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/5079