Westport 87 comes from Siskind’s Tar Abstracts portfolio, a series of photographs documenting the fruits of his search for “poetic” tar on asphalt roads. Siskind began his career as a documentary photographer, but turned away from representation and toward abstraction. Siskind and the Abstract Expressionist painters were mutually influential, and their works are often exhibited together. The Tar Abstracts portfolio speaks to both Siskind’s photographic origins and the specifics of his distancing from them. Their subjects, if rendered in traditional documentary photographic style, would be mundane. Through his careful framing of the tar, however, he draws attention to its calligraphic curves, which combine to form a hidden geography and are evocative in their ambiguity. To complete the transformation of his subjects into things of painterly abstraction, he made prints of the portfolio using the archaic method of photogravure in addition to gelatin silver prints. In photogravure, a photographic negative is transferred to a copper plate, and then transferred to a print from the etching, with rich results. Through his methods, Siskind renders the mundane striking and makes a persuasive case for the expressive capacity of photography.
-Ethan Spielman