New York 78

Siskind took his first abstract photographs in 1943. For a long time the critics did not know what to make of them. Was he imitating the work of Abstract Expressionist painters whom he counted as his friends and with whom he exhibited? Did he influence them? Or was he ‘an artist who happened to use a camera,’ as his gallery agent Charles Egan remarked in 1947?

New York 78

Siskind took his first abstract photographs in 1943. For a long time the critics did not know what to make of them. Was he imitating the work of Abstract Expressionist painters whom he counted as his friends and with whom he exhibited? Did he influence them? Or was he ‘an artist who happened to use a camera,’ as his gallery agent Charles Egan remarked in 1947?