“A GRAPHIC, METAPHORIC EMOTIONAL POWER”: AARON SISKIND’S PLACES

SISKIND, Aaron. Places: Aaron Siskind Photographs. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, (1976). Square quarto, original gray cloth, original photographic dust jacket. $750.

First trade edition of Siskind’s classic photobook, with over 85 duotone photographic plates, including the series “Homage to Franz Kline.”

The work of Aaron Siskind, a figure “best known for his nearly abstract black-and-white pictures and a major influence on the development of postwar art photography… represents a bold refusal of the camera’s customary perspectival depth.” Siskind’s mature work, such as that represented here in Places, focuses on “close-up details of painted walls, asphalt pavement, rocks and lava flows… [with] both the traditional descriptiveness of conventional photographs and a graphic, metaphoric emotional power” (New York Times). “Siskind exemplifies the move at the end of the 1940s from social documentary to the more personally inflected photograph… and could be said to represent the abstract strain of 1950s American art and photography,” just as the influential work of “William Klein exemplifies the expressionist” strain (Parr & Badger, 251). Throughout, “Siskind was doing what photography does: pushing the medium forward” (Roth, 152). Featuring photographs taken from 1967-75 in Mexico, Greece, Peru, Italy and the United States; with introductory essay by art critic Thomas Hess. First trade edition, issued same year as signed limited edition, no priority established.

Book fine; light foxing, edge-wear to bright photographic dust jacket. A handsome, near-fine copy.