Aaron Siskind

Aaron Siskind was born in New York City in 1903. For 25 years of his life, Siskind taught high school English in NY and practiced photography as a hobby. His work had gone unrecognized until he joined the New York Photo League in the 1930’s. Known as an Abstract Expressionist photographer, he taught at BMC in the summer of 1951. Following his summer in North Carolina he went on to teach photography at IIT Institute of Design in Chicago alongside BMC professor Harry Callahan. For the next ten years he remained as the head of the photography department. The artist received the National Endowment for the Arts Grant for Visual Arts in Photography in 1976, and was awarded the degree of Honorary Doctor of Arts from Columbia College, Chicago as well as several other notable accomplishments. Siskind died in 1991.