I’ve just been reading John Szarkowski‘s “Evening Lecture at Wellesley College” which he gave in 1977 and is reproduced along with pertinent illustrations on American Suburb X (ASX) a site so stuffed with interest that I hardly dare visit it for fear of spending far too long there.
As always, Szarkowski is a delight to read, even if I sometimes feel his felicity with words can sometimes run away with him. His starting point is the assertion that “the function of the photographer is to decide what his subject is. I mean that this is his only function.”
What follows is an examination of this through the work of some fairly disparate photographers – Frith, Lange, Winogrand, some largely anonymous newspaper photography and on of course to Atget, who he starts by calling “perhaps simply the best of all photographers” and then reminding us that although widely regarded as a ‘primitive’, the pictures suggest he was “a man who understood that photography could be a precise, critical tool, a system with which an artist could define exactly what he thought to be true.”
Finally he goes on to consider the work of Bill Dane, then “a young California painter” who a few years earlier had begun to send unsolicited postcards of images taken on his travels to a group of around a hundred influential critics etc in photography. This was long before the era of the world wide web when everyone has a blog (even if most have few readers) or puts image after image on Flikr. Having to pay for the postcard printing paper (then you could buy special postcard size heavyweight photographic paper with backs already printed for the purpose),to go into the darkroom and expose and process his cards one by one and then to pay postage created a natural limitation on his output – often I wish for for a similar throttle on photo-sharing sites.
Szarkowski suggests that most of the recipients were more taken by the novelty of the project (some things never change) and that he was unusual in taking an interest in the images – leading to Unfamiliar Places: A Message from Bill Dane being shown at MoMA in 1973-4 (you can view the press release.) Bill Dane, on his web site, dedicates his ‘Volume 1‘ to Szarkowski. You can also see many of his later images in volumes 2-14, although I enjoyed the early work most. His biography on the site sums up his work well: ‘If you’re not confused, you’re not paying attention.’
Bill Dane is also on Flikr, and has a blog and he makes a great offer of his work which I think is very much in the spirit of our medium:
Everything is for sale.
$99.
Choose any picture from my Website or Flickr.
Decide the exact size of your picture.
Pay for the production costs.
No more limited editions – just reasonably priced archival pigment inkjet prints more or less any size you want.