New York 143
Aaron Siskind's *New York 143* is a striking gelatin silver print that transforms urban surfaces into abstract compositions, isolating textures, peeling paint, and weathered markings found on the city's walls and streets. Siskind's signature close-up perspective strips away context, turning the mundane details of the built environment into bold, graphic forms that blur the line between photography and abstract expressionism. The high contrast of the black-and-white print intensifies the interplay of light and shadow, giving the image a raw, painterly quality.
- Medium
- Gelatin silver print.
- Location
- Phillips, Salt Lake City, UT
- Spotted At
- Auction House · PhillipsView on map
🔨 Auction Lot
Photographs from the Art Institute of Chicago - Online Only
December 22, 2014
More by Aaron Siskind
Artists in conversation
Harry Callahan
American · b. 1912
Callahan similarly used gelatin silver prints to isolate everyday urban and natural surfaces into stark abstract compositions, sharing Siskind's high contrast black and white aesthetic and modernist impulse to find graphic abstraction in overlooked details of the physical world.
Minor White
American · b. 1908
White pursued close up photographic studies of weathered surfaces and textures, transforming walls, rocks, and peeling materials into deeply abstract black and white prints that carry the same visual tension between documentary photography and abstract expressionist sensibility found in Siskind's work.
Brett Weston
American · b. 1911
Weston created high contrast black and white prints that extracted bold abstract forms from urban surfaces, industrial textures, and weathered materials, achieving the same graphic minimalism and abstraction from the built environment that defines Siskind's New York series.
Start the Discussion
Request access to join the discussion