Untitled

Aaron Siskind began his photographic career as a social documentarian, photographing life during the Great Depression. These four photographs belong to a compilation of 52 photographs that made up the artist’s most famous documentary series, Harlem Document, which was part of a larger project initiated by the New York Photo League to examine urban neighborhoods. From 1932 until 1940, he made these vibrant pictures of people, streets, and home-life in Harlem, reflecting the neighborhood’s social, political, and economic conditions. The photographs have a sense of intimacy, artfully presenting Harlem as simultaneously lively, careworn, and deteriorating. Despite his skill as a social documentarian, Siskind began to shift towards abstraction in the early 1940s.