Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation 92
Aaron Siskind
American, 1903–1991
1956
A gelatin silver print that freezes a leaping figure midair, with Siskind using photography to turn the human body into an abstract, levitating form.
What strikes you is the isolated, inverted silhouette against a blank white field—limbs folded and outstretched like a bold, sculptural shape suspended in space.
Part of Siskind’s Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation series, it helped push postwar photography toward abstraction by treating gesture, rhythm, and negative space as the photograph’s subject, aligning the medium with Abstract Expressionist concerns.
Medium
Gelatin silver print
Dimensions
10 15/16 × 10 3/8" (27.8 × 26.3 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Gift of Robert B. Menschel
Accession
512.2016
Palette
Exhibitions
