Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation #50 1961

Aaron Siskind made this gelatin silver print, *Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation #50*, sometime in the last century. The print shows a figure in mid-air, rendered as a stark silhouette against a bright white background. I love how the body is caught in this weightless moment. The title itself suggests an ambivalence—that space between joy and fear. Siskind’s use of high contrast emphasizes the starkness of the figure, turning it into a graphic shape, almost like a brushstroke, floating on the blank picture plane. You can feel his experimentations, a constant shifting between representation and abstraction. The image reminds me of work by Minor White, another photographer who explored the poetics of the everyday. Photography, like painting, is deeply process-oriented. Siskind embraced the unexpected, finding beauty in the accidental. Artists are always in dialogue with each other across time, so the work of one inspires and enriches the work of another.