Blog About Photography

From the New Yorker that just arrived on my doorstep.

© Greg Wasserstrom

Per­haps you’ve noticed the silence ema­nat­ing from my par­tic­u­lar cor­ner of the inter­net. This isn’t meant to be a com­plaint, but this is turn­ing out to be some­thing of stag­nant sum­mer for me. I’m here in D.C. fin­ish­ing the last class for my BA and while I have been shoot­ing like crazy, the film has been col­lect­ing in a B&H box under my desk for more than two months due to lack of funds. But! I sent the box off yes­ter­day and I am look­ing for­ward to the results. Snap­shot stuff, mostly.

I’ve also been work­ing on a zine which is sort of a new thing for me. I’ll make it avail­able through Etsy as soon as it’s ready — it’s about sex, I think.

There’s plenty of excit­ing news about the the fall, though: The Must Warn Oth­ers kick off show has been slated for Octo­ber 13 and should have a book to accom­pany it. In addi­tion to yours truly, the show will include Greg Lutze, Bryan Schut­maat, Ian Whit­more, Jerad Knud­son, Christina Mei Lutze and Leif Ander­son.

I am also going to have the oppor­tu­nity to travel through Europe for a hefty chunk of time (to be deter­mined). A seper­ate post on this will follow.

So, that’s the deal on this end. I hate it when I don’t post, so I’ll try and be bet­ter about it. Alec and Joerg and Shane have it so well cov­ered some­times, and who can say things bet­ter than they can?

Now that I have a lit­tle bit of money, I’m going to get the 30+ rolls of spent film sit­ting in a box under my desk devel­oped. I’m not even sure what’s down there any­more — espe­cially since I shot most of with Lori, and I have no idea if she even works or not. Also, since I don’t have a light meter and have got­ten tired of car­ry­ing my 35 around, every­thing I shot thru the Has­sel­blad I pretty much just eye­balled. Who knows what’s going to come out. I used to be metic­u­lous about this stuff, tak­ing meter read­ings 50 times before mak­ing an expo­sure. Now I’m just leav­ing it all to chance. I’ll send this stuff off tomor­row. We’ll see what hap­pens — maybe I’ll have some­thing to use for Grant’s book and the sum­mer Hot Shot.

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 20^th 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]