When Aaron Siskind arrived in Chicago in 1951 to teach photography at the Institute of Design (formerly the New Bauhaus), he was in the midst of a creative metamorphosis. During the 1930s he had been a member of the Workers Film and Photo League in New York and took documentary photographs, mostly of daily life in Harlem. In the mid-40s, though, he spent a summer in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and his subject matter took a turn from concrete pictures of people to sometimes abstract images of objects.
Siskind was a popular teacher at ID; he taught, among many others, Kenneth Josephson, Art Sinsabaugh, and Ray K. Metzker. “There were legions of younger people, like myself, who adored him,” one of his former students, Charles Traub, writes in the book’s introductory essay, “and who accompanied him shooting, eating, and socializing.”
(University of Texas Press)
