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Lot Essay
This important image dates from the moment when Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan first met and comes from a time when both were photographing walls. However, whilst Callahan's contemporaneous works present the layer upon layer of paper on a wall or use soft greys to record graffiti, here Siskind produces an image of stark black and white to emphasize the abstraction of paint dripped on a flat plane, a quality that directly parallels the recent paintings of Jackson Pollock. Through such images Siskind would come to be acknowledged as the most acclaimed Abstract Expressionist photographer.
1948, the year of this work, was also the year that Siskind had his second one-person show at the seminal Abstract Expressionist venue, the Charles Egan Gallery, immediately preceded by a show of black and white abstractions by Willem de Kooning.
1948 was also the moment when walls became the central subject of Siskind's work. Whereas in photographs of the mid 1940s the walls were used as an indispensable backdrop for pictures of isolated elements such as a glove, twigs or fish, by 1948 the wall itself was becoming Siskind's chief preoccupation.
Such was the importance of the present work that Siskind included this very print in the exhibition 'Abstract Photography' (1957-58) and then in 1959 chose a vertical variant as the cover of the first book of his photographs, Aaron Siskind Photographs.
1948, the year of this work, was also the year that Siskind had his second one-person show at the seminal Abstract Expressionist venue, the Charles Egan Gallery, immediately preceded by a show of black and white abstractions by Willem de Kooning.
1948 was also the moment when walls became the central subject of Siskind's work. Whereas in photographs of the mid 1940s the walls were used as an indispensable backdrop for pictures of isolated elements such as a glove, twigs or fish, by 1948 the wall itself was becoming Siskind's chief preoccupation.
Such was the importance of the present work that Siskind included this very print in the exhibition 'Abstract Photography' (1957-58) and then in 1959 chose a vertical variant as the cover of the first book of his photographs, Aaron Siskind Photographs.