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Aaron Siskind
© Jonathan Williams · Portrait of Aaron Siskind
Aaron Siskind
Aaron Siskind

Aaron Siskind

Country: United States
Birth: 1903 | Death: † 1991

Aaron Siskind was born on December 4, 1903 in New York. He was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants and the fifth of six children. After receiving his Bachelor of Social Science degree from the College of the City of New York in 1926, he went on to teach high school English in the New York public school system for 21 years. His first loves were music and poetry, but he took an interest in photography after his 1929 wedding, when he received his first camera as a honeymoon present. He began his career in photography as a documentarian in the New York Photo League in 1932. From 1936 to 1940, he oversaw the League’s Feature Group as they created documentary photo essays of political importance, fueled by a desire for social change.

On the invitation of Harry Callahan, Siskind joined the faculty of the Institute of Design in Chicago in 1951, taking over as head of the photography program in 1961, when Callahan left. Siskind and Callahan, famous for their synergy as teachers and photographers, reunited in 1971 when SIskind left the Institute of Design for the Rhode Island School of Design where Callahan then taught. Siskind continued to teach at RISD until his retirement in 1976. He traveled broadly, making multiple trips to Mexico and Italy, including a stint in Rome, funded by his 1966 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.

Siskind died at age 87 in Providence, Rhode Island. The Aaron Siskind Centennial Celebration took place in 2003 and 2004, with exhibitions at more than a dozen institutions across the country, each devoted to a different period or theme of his life and work.
Selected Books on Available on Amazon
Aaron Siskind: Another Photographic Reality
Aaron Siskind: Another Photographic Reality
Aaron Siskind, Charles Traub, Gilles Mora
Aaron Siskind 100
Aaron Siskind 100
Aaron Siskind
Harlem Photographs 1932-1940
Harlem Photographs 1932-1940
Aaron Siskind, Maricia Battle, Gordon Parks
Road Trip: Photographs 1980-1988
Road Trip: Photographs 1980-1988
Aaron Siskind, David Featherstone, Charles Traub
Aaron Siskind: Photographs, 1932-1978
Aaron Siskind: Photographs, 1932-1978
Aaron Siskind, Peter Turner

Galleries

Bruce Silverstein Gallery

Etherton Gallery

Website

Aaron Siskind Foundation

 

Selected Books

Aaron Siskind: Another Photographic Reality
Aaron Siskind: Another Photographic Reality
Aaron Siskind, Charles Traub, Gilles Mora
Aaron Siskind 100
Aaron Siskind 100
Aaron Siskind
Road Trip: Photographs 1980-1988
Road Trip: Photographs 1980-1988
Aaron Siskind, David Featherstone, Charles Traub
Aaron Siskind: Photographs, 1932-1978
Aaron Siskind: Photographs, 1932-1978
Aaron Siskind, Peter Turner

Inspiring Portfolios

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Shinji Ichikawa
© Shinji Ichikawa
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More Great Photographers To Discover

France Leclerc
France Leclerc
Canada
France Leclerc, born in Quebec, Canada, is an independent photographer who currently lives in Chicago. Her early career was in academia, teaching at MIT and the University of Chicago, but her true passion for documentary photography has now taken over. The curiosity and hunger for learning that had motivated her academic research career did not vanish. France now uses photography as a vehicle to understand and help depict issues that puzzle her, and satisfy her passion for learning. Among her most prominent themes are culture (especially disappearing ones), religion and social inequality, always focusing on the human element. Her images have now been shown in curated exhibitions and have won numerous awards including PDN World-in-Focus Competition in the Travel Portrait Category (2017), and in the Photo-Essay Category (2018), the APA National in the PhotoJournalism Category (2017), and the Julia Margaret Cameron Award in the Culture and Daily Life Category (2019). All About Photo Competitions All About Photo Awards 2019 AAP Magazine #8 Street AAP Magazine #11 Travels AAP Magazine #20 Travels AAP Magazine #29 Women AAP Magazine #37 Travels AAP Magazine #52 Street
Salvatore Valente
Salvatore Valente
Italy
1960
Salvatore Valente was born in Ostuni (Italy) on 10 June 1960. He began his career in the eighties, he discovered the passion for Ethnic groups in the world and above all for all those communities that are disappearing by organizing travels in search of populations in danger of extinction. During his professional growth as a photojournalist he has made several photo exhibitions, rich in lights and colors, natural landscapes, splits of everyday life and the expressiveness of the people who, with his looks, recount their lives. He has won more than 70 International Awards with a remarkable success in Mondo.
Colin Page
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I begun my journey into photography thanks partly to the Duke of Edinburgh Awards project and the help of my Dad who set up a make shift darkroom in the cramped spare bedroom. I worked in a professional darkroom and then art studio for nearly 20 years. Using many different film cameras, usually borrowed or second hand, I always developed and printed my own pictures. The new technologies replaced the darkroom and I was made redundant. I tried many different things including an HND in photography as a mature student. BUT…… After a long near death illness, and with the help of my family, I took up photography again. Mostly ‘street photography’ and with new digital cameras. Using a computer instead of a darkroom but only doing that could be done in a darkroom. Awarded Photographer of the Week - Week 04
Shinji Ichikawa
Shinji Ichikawa
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Born into a family that ran a photo studio, I grew up surrounded by cameras and photographs. After graduating from Tokyo Visual Arts in 1993, I entered the world of commercial photography as an assistant. In 1999, my artistic journey took me to New York, where I began a self-taught exploration into photographic expression, drawing inspiration from Surrealism and other artistic movements. My work often delves into the themes of space and presence that envelop the subject. In 2002, I returned to Shimane Prefecture and continued to produce and exhibit my photographic works while managing my family's studio. Winner AAP Magazine 39 Shadows Exclusive Interview with Shinji Ichikawa
Arthur Tress
Arthur Tress
United States
1940
Arthur Tress (born November 24, 1940) is an American photographer. He is known for his staged surrealism and exposition of the human body. Tress was born in Brooklyn, New York. The youngest of four children in a divorced family, Tress spent time in his early life with both his father, who remarried and lived in an upper-class neighborhood, and his mother, who remained single after the divorce and whose life was not nearly so luxurious. At age 12 he began to photograph circus freaks and dilapidated buildings around Coney Island in New York City, where he grew up. Tress studied at Abraham Lincoln High School in Coney Island, and gained a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. After graduating from Bard College in 1962, Tress moved to Paris, France to attend film school. While living in France, he traveled to Japan, Africa, Mexico, and throughout Europe. He observed many secluded tribes and cultures and was fascinated by the roles played by the shaman of the different groups of people. The cultures to which he was introduced would play a role in his later work. Tress spent the spring and summer of 1964 in San Francisco, documenting the Republican Convention that nominated Barry Goldwater, civil rights demonstrations at segregated car dealerships on Van Ness Avenue, and the Beatles launching their 1964 tour. Tress took over 900 photographs that were put away and re-discovered in 2009, and featured in a show at San Francisco's deYoung Museum. He currently resides in San Francisco, California. Source: Wikipedia Arthur Tress began his first camera work as a teenager in the surreal neighborhood of Coney Island where he spent hours exploring the decaying amusement parks. Later, during five years of world travel, mostly in Asia and Africa, he developed an interest in ethnographical photography that eventually led him to his first professional assignment as a U.S. government photographer recording the endangered folk cultures of Appalachia. Seeing the destructive results of corporate resource extraction, Tress began to use his camera to raise environmental awareness about the economic and human costs of pollution. Focusing on New York City, he began to photograph the neglected fringes of the urban waterfront with a straight documentary approach. This gradually evolved into a more personal mode of “magic realism” combining improvised elements of actual life with stage fantasy that became his hallmark style of directorial fabrication. In the late 1960s Tress was inspired to do a series based upon children's dreams that combined his interests in ritual ceremony, Jungian archetypes, and social allegory. Later bodies of work dealing with the hidden dramas of adult relationships and the reenactments of male homosexual desire evolved from this primarily theatrical approach. Beginning in the early 1980s, Tress began shooting in color, creating room-sized painted sculptural installations out of found medical equipment in an abandoned hospital on New York's Welfare Island. This led to a smaller scale exploration of narrative still life within a children's toy theater and a portable nineteenth-century aquarium. Around 2002, Tress returned to gelatin silver, exploring more formalist themes in the style of mid- century modernism, often combining a spontaneous shooting style with a constructivist's sense of architectural composition and abstract shape. In addition to images of California skateboard parks, his recent work includes the round images of the series Planets and the diamond-shaped images of Pointers. Source: www.arthurtress.com
Jaroslav Mares
Jaroslav Mares
Czech Republic
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Aaron Deppe
Aaron Deppe
Germany
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Aaron Deppe is a German Lifestyle and Portrait Photographer, born in Gifhorn (Germany) in 1988. Before photography, Aaron worked in the music industry and lived in Australia, Sydney for a while. Currently, he is a Berlin-based photographer who works with actors and other artists on their internet presence, as well as commercially for several brands and on movie sets.
Jim Goldberg
Jim Goldberg
United States
1953
Jim Goldberg (born 1953) is an American artist and photographer, whose work reflects long-term, in-depth collaborations with neglected, ignored, or otherwise outside-the-mainstream populations. Among the many awards Goldberg has received are three National Endowment of the Arts Fellowships in Photography, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, and the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. His works have been exhibited, published, and collected internationally. Goldberg is Professor Emeritus at the California College of the Arts, and has been a member of the Magnum Photos agency since 2002. He currently lives and works in the greater Bay Area. Goldberg is best known for his photography books, multi-media exhibitions, and video installations, among them: Rich and Poor (1985), Nursing Home, Raised by Wolves (1995), Hospice, and Open See (2009). 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His 1985 book Rich and Poor, re-released by Steidl in an expanded edition in 2014, includes photographs of people in their homes along with handwritten comments by them about their lives. For example, the handwriting under the photograph reproduced on the front cover reads "I keep thinking where we went wrong. We have no one to talk to now, however, I will not allow this loneliness to destroy me,— I STILL HAVE MY DREAMS. I would like an elegant home, a loving husband and the wealth I am used to. Countess Vivianna de Bronville." Although the book received one mixed review shortly after publication, other reviews were positive, and it was later selected as one of the greatest photobooks of the 20th century. The photographs in a 1986 exhibition of Goldberg's The Nursing Home Series were accompanied by handwritten text by the nursing home residents who were the subjects of the photographs. A review of a 1990 exhibition Shooting Back: Photography by and About the Homeless at the Washington Project for the Arts characterized the exhibition as "Issue Art" and characterized Goldberg as "a superior Issue Artist because he's a superior artist." A major mixed-media exhibition by Goldberg concerning at risk and homeless youth in California entitled Raised by Wolves began traveling in 1995 and was accompanied by a book of the same title. A review of the exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art noted that Goldberg made reference to other artists and photographers; used photographs, videos, objects, and texts to convey meaning; and "let his viewers feel, in some corner of their psyches, the lure of abject lowliness, the siren call of pain." Although the accompanying book received one mixed review shortly after publication, it was described as "a heartbreaking novel with pictures", and in The Photobook: A History, Martin Parr and Gerry Badger praised it as "complex and thoughtful." A 1999 mixed media installation at the San Francisco Arts Commission gallery entitled "57/78/97" explored race relations in the United States, including the Little Rock Crisis of 1957, the 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke decision, and the year following the passage of California Proposition 209 (1996) concerning affirmative action. Selected photographs from a series by Goldberg called "Open See," concerning refugees, immigrants, and trafficked people, were first exhibited in San Francisco in 2007. One review stated that the photographs may leave the viewer "paralyzed by uncertainty about what might alleviate the injustices" depicted. Part of the series came to be known as "Open See", and Goldberg's book of that title was published in 2009 by Steidl. In 2013 Goldberg was an artist in residence at Yale University Art Gallery with Donovan Wylie. They each created a body of work based in New Haven. In Candy, Jim Goldberg, a New Haven native, creates a multilayered photo-novel of aspiration and disillusionment, interspersing Super 8 film stills, images of New Haven’s urban landscape, annotated Polaroid portraits, and collaged archival materials to explicate the rise and fall of American cities in the 20th century. Goldberg considers New Haven’s quest to become a “model city” of America, contrasting its civic aspirations with its citizens’ lived realities.Source: Wikipedia Jim Goldberg’s innovative use of image and text make him a landmark photographer of our times. He has been working with experimental storytelling for over forty years, and his major projects and books include Rich and Poor (1977-85), Raised by Wolves (1985-95), Nursing Home (1986), Coming and Going (1996-present), Open See (2003-2009), The Last Son (2016), Ruby Every Fall (2016), Candy (2013-2017), Darrell & Patricia (2018), and Gene (2018). His work is in numerous private and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Getty, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He is the recipient of numerous awards including three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship (1985), the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award (2007), and the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2011). Goldberg is Professor Emeritus at the California College of the Arts and is a member of Magnum Photos.Source: Magnum Photos An heir to such social documentarians as Walker Evans and Robert Frank, Goldberg is inspired and informed by his ongoing interest in people and their positions in society as a function of broader cultural policies and practices. His work is the aesthetic embodiment of Frank’s opinion that “the truth is somewhere between the documentary and the fictional.”Source: Pace/MacGill Gallery
Arkady Shaikhet
Arkady Shaikhet
Russia
1898 | † 1959
Arkady Samoylovich Shaikhet was at the beginning a locksmith apprentice at a shipyard in Nikolaiev where he was born. He came to Moscow in 1918. At first he worked in a photographic studio were he retouched images of others but in 1924 his career as a photojournalist started. He worked for Rabochaïa Gazeta and the weekly Ogonek/Ogoniok. He was a pioneer in a new style of documentary photography called " artistic reportage". He became a member of the union of proletarian russian photographers (ROPF), a rival group of the other "October" founded by Aleksander Rodtchenko. Shaikhet favored a rigorous journalistic point of vue and his work was very sensitive to sociological problems. His images were at the frontier of documentary and artistic photography. In 1931 with two of his friends, M. Alpert and Sergueï Toules and also the editor in chief Mezhericher, he took 80 pictures in four days and called his series "24 hours in the life of the family Filippov, steelworker in the red proletarian factory of Moscow" These documents were published in the German magazine "Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (A.I.Z.) and then in the Russian magazine "USSR in Construction". They had a huge international impact. In 1928 Shaikhet presented 30 images at the big exhibition "Ten years of Soviet photography" and won the first prize. In 1930 he helped Russian photojournalists show their work at the Camera Club in London. During the 30s he took a lot of images of the economical and social changes happening in his country. He followed the Turkestan–Siberian railway, that connects Central Asia and Siberia but also the first cars and tractors. He was a war reporter during World War II for the newspaper Frontavaïa Illioustratsia.
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