Born 1903, Manhattan, New York
Died 1991


Educated at City College of New York, Siskind was an English teacher in the New York City public schools from 1926 to 1947. He was active in the Film and Photo League from 1932 to 1935and in 1936 he joined Sid Grossman at the newly formed Photo League. There he led the Feature Group, which produced such notable projects as Portrait of a Tenement (1937), Dead End: The Bowery (1937–38), Park Avenue North and South (1937), and Harlem Document an extended photo-documentation of Harlem made by a group of ten photographers between 1936 and 1940. Siskind left the Photo League in 1941 to pursue his own career in photography. He had five solo exhibitions at the Charles Egan Gallery (1947, 1948, 1949, 1951, 1954), and was included in a number of gallery and museum exhibitions. Around the same time, he resumed his teaching career. He taught photography at Trenton Junior College, New Jersey (1950); Black Mountain College, North Carolina (1951); the Institute of Design, Chicago (1951–71), where he became head of the department in 1961; Rhode Island School of Design (1971–76); and Harvard University (1973).