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Aaron Siskind led two lives, one as a seriously committed social documentary photographer and one as an Abstract Expressionist.  He did well in both lives, but it is in the latter involvement alongside artists such as Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and other American Abstract Expressionists, that his greatest impact is felt.  He did with light and a camera what the others did with canvas, brushes and paint, and although the processes were very different the results were remarkably the same.

This exhibition focuses on how Siskind made the journey from Socialist Realism, as a member of the Photo-League and organizer of the seminal Harlem Document to the very core of the first, and perhaps most significant post WWII American art movement - Abstract Expressionism.  The transition, when viewed from its poles seems extreme, but the closer you get to the very moments of change in Siskind's work, the more gradual and natural the changes appear...resembling an evolution that seemed almost inevitable once it began.

Today we have little difficulty in seeing paintings and photographs hanging together and exploring similar themes. And to be sure, even in the generation before Siskind's work, we find an even a more radical notion, namely that of the same artist being fluent in both media, eg. Steichen, Man Ray and Sheeller. What is harder to understand is how Siskind's work can seem so abstract, idealized and removed from this world, yet be so physically part of it. The fact that it is so seamlessly integrated with the work of the other members of the movement, is just another example of photography's and painting's ongoing dance of mutual influence.  What Siskind was doing was abandoning the simple description of a landscape you could see, to selecting elements to create a landscape you could feel.  It was not the accepted way photography went about its business of mirroring the whole obvious universe.  Siskind, rather, peeled back the surface of things, photographically, revealing more, but without changing a thing. He showed stronger truths lurking underneath the details of paint drips and man made marks that were mysterious, full of implications and portents...and in the end, full of wonder.