Photographer Aaron Siskind was born on this date in 1903. His simple, elegant photographs are testimony to the real life that was Harlem in the 1930s.
Harlem Document
Photographer Aaron Siskind was born on this date in 1903. His simple, elegant photographs are testimony to the real life that was Harlem in the 1930s.
Siskind described his approach to documentary photographs in a June 1945 article:
"And finally, the pictures themselves, each one planned, talked, taken, and examined in terms of the whole. I worked pretty much this way in making 'Harlem Document.' However, I cautioned my co-workers on this job to become as passive as possible when they faced the subject, to de-energize for the moment their knowledge of the ideas about the subject, to let the facts fall away and at that crucial moment to permit the subject to speak for itself and in its own way."
Source: Harlem Photographs 1932–1940 Aaron Siskind (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, 1990).
Pictured: Aaron Siskind, 1903–91, Cook at Father Divine Mission, Harlem, about 1935, printed later, gelatin silver print on paper, 14 x 10 7/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Tennyson and Fern Schad, courtesy of Light Gallery.