Abstract Expressionist With Camera

I once saw an old man on the street in Newport, R.I., his view camera was on a tripod, a blackout cloth was draped over his shoulder and the camera was pointed at the side of a clapboard house with peeling paint. I was 19, but even then I knew he was an artist. This was not photography like they did at weddings or football games, this was ART.  

I asked him what he was doing and he told me he was “making a photograph.” His name was Aaron Siskind and he was then a professor at Rhode Island School of Design. By that point in my life I understood that photography could transcend its practical purposes and be art. It was like the old saying about pornography, I may not be able to tell you what it is but I know it when I see it. In the case of photography, I know what is art because it moves me in a particular way.  Aaron Siskind’s work now hanging at James Barron Gallery in Kent, Conn., still does that to me. It may not be paint but it moves me in the way a Franz Kline painting can move me. 

The Siskind prints are all from the collection of James Barron’s parents, and this is their first public showing. Lynn and Steven Barron had never collected photography until one day in 1979 when they walked into a Providence R.I. gallery where their son James was working. They saw Siskind’s work, fell in love with it and after a studio visit with Siskind, they bought 22 vintage prints which are the same prints hung in this show. 

Aaron Siskind  (1903 -1991) is the abstact expressionist of 20th century photography.  In the 1930s Siskind, began as a social documentarian.  As a member of the New York Photo League he photographed life in Harlem and produced the famous “Harlem Document.”  By the mid 1940s he became interested in abstract expressionism in painting and he began to find those ideas in everyday life and to make images from found objects and places. Siskind was a member of Studio 35, a group of  artists and thinkers founded by David Hare, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman and William Baziotes. His friendships with Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb and Jack Tworkov among others, profoundly influenced his photography. The iconic black and white pictures we now assosicate with Siskind are closeups of peeling posters, chipping paint, bits of seaweed on sand and other splotches of ordinary life that he moved in on to create abstract images.

A wonderful show, “Aaron Siskind, A Painter’s Photographer”  is a tribute to Aaron Siskind’s Abstract Expressionist roots — there are 22 vintage Siskind prints interspersed with work by  Anthony Caro, Brice Marden, Ray Johnson, Hans Hoffman, Jack Tweorkov, Willem de Kooning and Milton Resnick. 

Through April 28 at James Barron, 17 Old Barn Rd., Kent, Conn. 917-270-8044, www.jamesbarronart.com