John Szarkowski
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The blog has been silent for a couple of weeks now because I’ve been doing some traveling and thinking about what exactly I’m going to do with myself when college ends in exactly 34 days. Usually, that’s the kind of thing I would post about here, but I’d like for this blog to become less about my own personal trajectory and more about my growing relationship with imagery. Yeah, only I don’t know what that means and so I haven’t really written anything down. I was in a diner outside of Gettysburg, PA on Sunday when I read that John Szarkowski, the luminary MoMa curator of photography, had passed away at 81 years old.
I don’t mean to be melodramatic. I obviously didn’t know this man personally as many of my friends out in the photosphere who have written about him in the past few days did. I never even got the opportunity to attend a lecture of his, though I did send my mother when he spoke at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston last summer while I was here in D.C. (she sent me signed copies of his wonderful books). I can say though, that I have as I have pieced my ad hoc photo education together over the course of the past three years or so, Szarkowski’s writing has been central to my development as a photographer. Now he belongs to the history books, like Steichen and Stieglitz, Evans and Cartier-Bresson and so many other canonical figures who’s presence in the art world is no longer tangible.
Please pardon me if my history is skewed or off in some way here, but it seems to me that no single person since perhaps Alfred Steiglitz had the kind of influence on photography that Szarkowski has had. From his perch at the Museum of Modern Art, he put on show after show of perception-altering from work from the artists who shaped the way photographs were made in the second half of the 20th century. It seems to me that Edward Steichen’s 1955 Family of Man pretty much summed up the way our society viewed photography: illustrative documents of the human condition, Life Magazine style. More than any other single individual, he turned photography from mere document to social mirror, most notable with photographers Diane Arbus, Gary Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and William Eggleston.
Just as important as Szarkowski’s eyes are his words. From the essay he wrote in William Eggleston’s Guide, the catalog of that photographer’s 1972 MoMA show Color Photographs, to the interview Szarkowski gave last summer to Art in America, his insight into what about certain photographs resonates with us is why is invaluable and every word of it is to be treasured.
Maybe reverence of this kind is silly to bestow of any individual. We’re all just people, after all. But had Edward Steichen chosen someone else to fill his shoes at the Modern, I think we can all be certain that contemporary photography would look quite different than it does today.
John Szarkowski’s obituary from the New York Times [Link]
An appreciation of Szarkowsky, also from the Times, penned by Verlyn Klinkenborg. [Link]
Szarkowski stories on Alec’s blog. [Link]
Shane Lavalette’s appreciation of Szarkowsky. [Link]