AARON SISKIND
Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation (#63) 1956
center for creative photography, university of arizona, tucson
hands: amy rule, 8.20.93

Beginning in 1953, Aaron Siskind photographed men sprawled against the sky as they dove or jumped into the water. The second frame from the bottom of this strip of negatives is #63 in the series he titled Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation.

As the editors of Minicam magazine cautioned when printing a portfolio of Siskind’s work, “Documentary pictures are as often a document to the singular point of view of the photographer as they may be to the scene itself.”

Or as Siskind put it in 1958, “The emphasis of meaning [in a photograph] has shifted—shifted from what the world looks like to what we feel about the world and what we want the world to mean.”