Siskind minimized the importance of literal representation by carefully distinguishing between a photograph of something—which is a distinct, flat object shaped by the photographer’s perception—and his fully three-dimensional subject or “the thing itself.”
This intimate exhibition combined key images from Siskind’s first forays into abstraction with the artist’s own eloquent writings in order to examine the tension inherent in his work: between the artist’s perception and the literal representation of an object.