Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation, photographed by Aaron Siskind along Chicago's Lake Michigan shoreline from 1953 to 1965, depicts young people caught in midair as they dive from a board toward the water. Made as he moved away from the social documentary approach of Harlem Document, the series examines how photography can convert fleeting action into an autonomous, metaphorical image. Its airborne bodies hold pleasure and fear, freedom and peril, in unresolved tension while reducing individual identity to posture and contour.
The black-and-white photographs typically isolate a single dark figure against an almost blank white sky. Tight cropping removes the water, horizon, diving board, surrounding city, and anticipated point of impact. Within the frame, bodies bend, twist, extend, or contract into sharply delineated shapes that can resemble marks or script. This spatial uncertainty makes it difficult to determine whether a figure appears to rise, fall, hover, or hang. Siskind favored irregular, unpredictable configurations rather than technically accomplished dives, giving the sequence a mood that shifts between play and vulnerability.
Working with a handheld, medium-format twin-lens-reflex camera, Siskind stood beneath the diving board and aimed upward. He used available afternoon sunlight to articulate the divers' bodies and photographed when groups of young people were playing, allowing chance movements to supply unexpected forms. Darkroom procedures removed clouds, reduced descriptive detail, and strengthened the contrast between figure and ground. The resulting gelatin-silver prints were produced at different moments, with some 1950s negatives printed again during the 1970s and 1980s.
A ten-print selection from the series was issued in 1972 as a LIGHT Gallery portfolio in an edition of 15, under the variant title Terrors and Pleasures of Levitation. Its title also informed Carl Chiarenza's 1982 career study Aaron Siskind: Pleasures and Terrors. Photographs from the project later appeared in MoMA's Siskind from the Collection in 1989 and in centennial exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, RISD Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, during 2003 and 2004.
