Producing a photographic document involves preparation in excess. There is first the examination of the idea of the project. Then the visits to the scene, the casual conversations, and more formal interviews - talking, and listening, and looking, looking. ... And finally, the pictures themselves, each one planned, talked, taken and examined in terms of the whole.
Aaron SiskindAlmost inevitably there are tensions in the picture, tensions between the outside world and the inside world. For me, a successful picture resolves these tensions without eliminating them.
Aaron SiskindIn any art, you don't know in advance what you want to say - it's revealed to you as you say it. That's the difference between art and illustration.
Aaron SiskindIf you look very intensely and slowly things will happen that you never dreamed of before.
Aaron SiskindWhat is the subject matter of this apparently very personal world? It has been suggested that these shapes and images are underworld characters, the inhabitants of the vast common realm of memories that have gone down below the level of conscious control. It may be they are. The degree of emotional involvement and the amount of free association with the material being photographed would point in that direction.
Aaron Siskind