sion that saw Siskind become not only a practi-
tioner but also a teacher of the photographic art.
Ten years later, he was promoted to Head of Photo-
graphy at Chicago, and ten years after that he
became Professor of Photography at the Rhode
Island School of Design. He finally retired from
teaching photography in 1976, at the age of 73. As
a teacher, he inspired and acted as an almost avun-
cular mentor for his often distinguished students,
who credit him with encouraging them to develop
their own, individual styles. In 1975, a group of five
grateful former students staged an exhibition of
their work under the titleFor You Aaron.
Siskind experimented with a number of different
approaches. The mid-1950s, for example, saw him
produce hisPleasures and Terrors of Levitationse-
ries, in which young men in swimming shorts were
isolated in apparent free-fall against a white sky. In
Martha’s Vineyard, he composed structural studies
of rocks and stones. Toward the end of the decade, he
created a series of over 100 photographs of bare feet.
Trees were a recurring theme to which he returned
throughout both the 1960s and 1970s. He photo-
graphed weathered olive trees in Corfu, and returned
continually to a favorite old oak in Martha’s Vine-
yard, which appears in many different versions, but
always designated simply as ‘‘The Tree.’’
From the 1940s to his death in 1991, however,
Siskind’s most consistent and personal theme
remained the flat-plane abstraction, typically com-
posed from the neglected details of the man-made
environment. In Chicago and New York, he found
decaying walls, graffiti, peeling paint, the remains
of tattered posters, and rusting signs. Each was
photographed in monochrome and printed with a
richness that—despite the deliberate two-dimen-
sional approach—nevertheless accentuated the tex-
ture of the subject. The subject itself, however,
always remained relegated to a supporting role in
aid of the greater composition.
Although Chicago and the East Coast provided
Siskind with ample opportunities to photograph, he
became an inveterate traveler in both North America
and the rest of the world. He photographed in Ari-
zona while on sabbatical from school teaching in
1949, and in North Carolina in 1951. In 1955, he
took a ten-week trip to Mexico, to which he returned
on numerous subsequent occasions. A recurring
theme in his Mexican photographs is layers of graf-
fiti on white-washed walls. In many cases, politically
offending graffiti had been hastily painted over by
the authorities; the paint had run in the hurry, and
the rapid brushwork produced almost graphic forms
and characters, which Siskind photographed with
studied enthusiasm. Sometimes the fragmented rem-
nants of notices and posters would be added to the
mix. Similar work was produced in Rome, Peru, and
Mexico in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, he
traveled to Brazil, Morocco, Mexico, Peru, Sicily,
and the Italian mainland. In 1986, he broke a leg
while traveling in Turkey. A long convalescence fol-
lowed, and Siskind, now into his eighties and walk-
ing with a cane, began increasingly to depend upon
assistants to help him with his work and domestic
life. His last published series was one of tar-filled
cracks in highways, made in Rhode Island, Connec-
ticut, and Vermont between 1986 and 1988, and
published the following year.
That travel was so important to Siskind and his
work was underlined by the titles of two published
collections of his photographs:Places: Aaron Sis-
kind Photographs (1975) andRoad Trip (1989).
Two important points emerge from these photo-
graphic travels. First, the graffiti photographs—
particularly those from South America and
Italy—have much in common with the abstract
expressionist painting with which Siskind had
come into contact in New York during the 1950s
and 1960s. This is especially true of his friend and
collaborator Franz Kline, whose most famous
works feature broad, black, graphic-style brush-
work on a plain white ground. Kline died in 1962,
and 10 years later, Siskind began a long-cherished
project inHomage to Franz Kline. This included
photographs taken in Mexico, Italy, Boston, and
Peru, and was finally exhibited in Chicago in 1975,
along with two paintings by Kline himself. The
second important point to emerge from Siskind’s
‘‘travel’’ photographs is their remarkable similar-
ity. No matter when or where they are taken, Sis-
kind’s personal and recognizable style eclipses the
specifics of time and location. Sicily in 1984, for
example, is not markedly different from Lima in
1975 or even Chicago in 1948. To some, this repre-
sents a criticism of Siskind’s work. To others, it
emphasizes the uniqueness and consistency of his
personal vision.
From an intellectual perspective, Siskind’s flat-
plane photography actively renounces one of pho-
tography’s greatest achievements: the mechanical
illusion of three-dimensional space on a two-
dimensional surface. Siskind’s work rejects the sim-
ple imitation of reality. It seeks neither to represent
nature, nor to provide the viewer with a substitute
for ‘‘being there’’ himself or herself. Instead, it cre-
ates the photograph as an individual work of art in
its own right. This transcendence of subject matter
(which had been understood by painters at least
since the Post-impressionists) helps deny the claims
of some theorists (such as Roger Scruton), whoSISKIND, AARON