On John Szarkowski

I’d not read the obituary of John Szarkowski, the man who defined our medium for several decades in his tenure at MoMA in New York from 1962-1991 and whose work remains a strong influence, written for Artforum in 2007 by Maria Morris Hambourg, so it was interesting to see it republished on American Suburb X.

Although I’ve sometimes poked a little fun at some of his writing, his view of the medium was largely one that I subscribed too, based as it was – and as Hambourg makes clear – on the work of Walker Evans, whose ‘American Photographs’ remains one of the truly great photographic works. Among the aspects of Szarkowski’s work that particularly interested me were his promotion of the work of Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, and also the re-evaluation that he made of the work of Eugene Atget, with his fine series of four books of his work, a project with which Hambourg was involved, and which came out around the time I was also investigating his work in my own ‘Paris Revisited‘, recently revised and republished as In Search of Atget.

Hambourg also mentions his ‘Looking at Photographs‘, still one of the better books which displays some of the joys to be appreciated in photography, although perhaps surprisingly she fails to mention his ‘The Photographer’s Eye‘, arguably the best introduction to how our medium works.

As she says, the “new directorial mode, constructed realities, appropriated pictorial worlds, and borrowed media identities interested him not at all”; like me he felt they had little to offer photography. Hambourg sees this as a weakness, but it came from the strength of his belief in the essential core of the medium and his appreciation of its subtleties and power.