John_Szarkowski the Photographer's Eye (Text Only) 1966

8/4/2019 John_Szarkowski the Photographer's Eye (Text Only) 1966

1/6

photokaboom.com

John SzarkowskiIntroduction to the catalog of the exhibition, ThePhotographer's Eye

By John SzarkowskiBookFinder.com

The Photographer's EyeThis book is an investigation of whatphotographs look like, and of why they look thatway. It is concerned with photographic style andwith photographic tradition: with the sense ofpossibilities that a photographer today takes tohis work.The invention of photography provided aradically new picture-making process-a processbased not on synthesis but on selection. Thedifference was a basic one. Paintings were made-constructed from a storehouse of traditionalschemes and skills and attitudes-butphotographs, as the man on the street put it, weretaken.The difference raised a creative issue of a neworder: how could this mechanical and mindlessprocess be made to produce pictures meaningfulin human terms-pictures with clarity andcoherence and a point of view? Itwas soondemonstrated that an answer would not be foundby those who loved too much the old forms, forin large part the photographer was bereft of theold artistic traditions. Speaking of photographyBaudelaire said: "This industry, by invading theterritories of art, has become art's most mortal

enemy."! And in his own terms of referenceBaudelaire was half right; certainly the newmedium could not satisfy old standards. Thephotographer must find new ways to make hismeaning clear.

These new ways might be found by men whocould abandon their allegiance to traditionalpictorial standards-or by the artisticallyignorant, who had no old allegiances to break.There have been many of the latter sort. Since itsearliest days, photography has been practiced bythousands who shared no common tradition ortraining, who were disciplined and united by noacademy or guild, who considered their mediumvariously as a science, an art, a trade, or anentertainment, and who were often unaware ofeach other's work. Those who inventedphotography were scientists and painters, but itsprofessional practitioners were a very differentlot. Hawthorne's daguerreotypist hero Holgravein the house of the seven gables was perhaps notfar from typical:"Though now but twenty-two years old, he hadalready been a country schoolmaster; salesmanin a country store; and the political editor of acountry newspaper. He had subsequentlytraveled as a peddler of cologne water and otheressences. He had studied and practiced dentistry.Still more recently he had been a public lectureron mesmerism, for which science he had veryremarkable endowments. His present phase as adaguerreotypist was of no more importance inhis own view, nor likely to be more permanent,than any of the preceding ones."The enormous popularity of the new mediumproduced professionals by the thousands-converted silversmiths, tinkers, druggists,blacksmiths and printers. If photography was anew artistic problem, such men had theadvantage of having nothing to unlearn. Amongthem they produced a flood of images. In 1853the New York daily tribune estimated that three

ICharles Baudelaire, "Salon de 1859," translated byJonathan Mayne for The Mirror of Art, Crit ical Studies byCharles Beudeleire London: Phaidon Press, 1955. (Quotedfrom On Photography, A Source Book of Photo History inFecsimile, edited by Beaumont Newhall . Watkins Glen, N.Y.: Century House, 1956, p. 106.)

2 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The [louse of the Seven Gables. NewYork: Signet Classics edition, 1961, pp. 156-7.


2/6

million daguerreotypes were being produced thatyear.' Some of these pictures were the product ofknowledge and skill and sensibility andinvention; many were the product of accident,improvisation, misunderstanding, and empiricalexperiment. But whether produced by art or byluck, each picture was part of a massive assaulton our traditional habits of seeing.By the latter decades of the nineteenth centurythe professionals and the serious amateurs werejoined by an even larger host of casualsnapshooters. By the early eighties the dry plate,which could be purchased ready-to-use, hadreplaced the refractory and messy wet plateprocess, which demanded that the plate beprepared just before exposure and processedbefore its emulsion had dried. The dry platespawned the hand camera and the snapshot.Photography had become easy. In 1893 anEnglish writer complained that the new situationhad "created an army of photographers who runrampant over the globe, photographing objects ofall sorts, sizes and shapes, under almost everycondition, without ever pausing to askthemselves, is this or that artistic? ... They spy aview, it seems to please, the camera is focused,the shot taken! There is no pause, why shouldthere be? For art may err but nature cannot miss,says the poet, and they listen to the dictum. Tothem, composition, light, shade, form and textureare so many catch phrases ... ,,4These pictures, taken by the thousands byjourneyman worker and Sunday hobbyist, wereunlike any pictures before them. The variety oftheir imagery was prodigious. Each subtlevariation in viewpoint or light, each passingmoment, each change in the tonality of the print,created a new picture. The trained artist coulddraw a head or a hand from a dozen perspectives.The photographer discovered that the gestures ofa hand were infinitely various, and that the wallof a building in the sun was never twice thesame.

3 A. C. Willers, "Poet and Photography," in Picturescope,Vol. XI , No.4. New York: Picture Divis ion, SpecialLibraries Association, 1963, p. 46.

4 E. E. Cohen, "Bad Form in Photography," in TheInternational Annual of Anthony's Photographic Bulletin.New York and London: E. and H. T. Anthony, 1893, p. 18.

2

Most of this deluge of pictures seemed formlessand accidental, but some achieved coherence,even in their strangeness. Some of the newimages were memorable, and seemed significantbeyond their limited intention. Theseremembered pictures enlarged one's sense ofpossibilities as he looked again at the real world.While they were remembered they survived, likeorganisms, to reproduce and evolve.But it was not only the way that photographydescribed things that was new; it was also thethings it chose to describe. Photographers shot". .. objects of all sorts, sizes and shapes ...without ever pausing to ask themselves, is this orthat artistic?" Painting was difficult, expensive,and precious, and it recorded what was known tobe important. Photography was easy, cheap andubiquitous, and it recorded anything: shopwindows and sod houses and family pets andsteam engines and unimportant people. And oncemade objective and permanent, immortalized in apicture, these trivial things took on importance.By the end of the century, for the first time inhistory, even the poor man knew what hisancestors had looked like.The photographer learned in two ways: first,from a worker's intimate understanding of histools and materials (if his plate would not recordthe clouds, he could point his camera down andeliminate the sky); and second he learned fromother photographs, which presented themselvesin an unending stream. Whether his concern wascommercial or artistic, his tradition was formedby all the photographs that had impressedthemselves upon his consciousness.The pictures reproduced in this book were madeover almost a century and a quarter. They weremade for various reasons, by men of differentconcerns and varying talent. They have in factlittle in common except their success, and ashared vocabulary: these pictures areunmistakably photographs. The vision they sharebelongs to no school or aesthetic theory, but tophotography itself. The character of this visionwas discovered by photographers at work, astheir awareness of photography's potentials grew.If this is true, it should be possible to considerthe history of the medium in terms ofphotographers' progressive awareness ofcharacteristics and problems that have seemed

2


3/6

inherent in the medium. Five such issues areconsidered below.These issues do not define discrete categories ofwork; on the contrary they should be regarded asinterdependent aspects of a single problem- assection views through the body of photographictradition. As such, it is hoped that they maycontribute to the formulation of a vocabulary anda critical perspective more fully responsive to theunique phenomena of photography.

The Thing ItselfThe first thing that the photographer learned wasthat photography dealt with the actual; he hadnot only to accept this fact, but to treasure it;unless he did, photography would defeat him. Helearned that the world itself is an artist ofincomparable inventiveness, and that torecognize its best works and moments, toanticipate them, to clarify them and make thempermanent, requires intelligence both acute andsupple.But he learned also that the factuality of hispictures, no matter how convincing andunarguable, was a different thing than the realityitself. Much of the reality was filtered out in thestatic little black and white image, and some of itwas exhibited with an unnatural clarity, anexaggerated importance. The subject and thepicture were not the same thing, although theywould afterwards seem so. Itwas thephotographer's problem to see not simply thereality before him but the still invisible picture,and to make his choices in terms of the latter.This was an artistic problem, not a scientific one,but the public believed that the photograph couldnot lie, and it was easier for the photographer ifhe believed it too, or pretended to. Thus he waslikely to claim that what our eyes saw was anillusion, and what the camera saw was the truth.Hawthorne's Holgrave, speaking of a difficultportrait subject said: "We give [heaven's broadand simple sunshine] credit only for depictingthe merest surface, but it actually brings out thesecret character with a truth that no painterwould ever venture upon, even could he detectit . .. the remarkable point is that the originalwears, to the world's eye ... an exceedinglypleasant countenance, indicative of benevolence,openness of heart, sunny good humor, and otherpraiseworthy qualities of that cast. The sun, as

3

you see, tells quite another story, and will not becoaxed out of it, after half a dozen patientattempts on my part. Here we have a man, sly,subtle, hard, imperious, and withal, cold as ice'"In a sense Holgrave was right in giving morecredence to the camera image than to his owneyes, for the image would survive the subject,and become the remembered reality. William M.Ivins, Jr. said "at any given moment the acceptedreport of an event is of greater importance thanthe event, for what we think about and act uponis the symbolic report and not the concrete eventitself. ,,6 He also said: "The nineteenth centurybegan by believing that what was reasonable wastrue and it would end up by believing that what itsaw a photograph of was true. ,,7

The DetailThe photographer was tied to the facts of things,and it was his problem to force the facts to tellthe truth. He could not, outside the studio, posethe truth, he could only record it as he found it,and it was found in nature in a fragmented andunexplained form-not as a story, but asscattered and suggestive clues. The photographercould not assemble these clues into a coherentnarrative, he could only isolate the fragment,document it, and by so doing claim for it somespecial significance, a meaning which wentbeyond simple description. The compellingclarity with which a photograph recorded thetrivial suggested that the subject had neverbefore been properly seen, that it was in factperhaps not trivial, but filled with undiscoveredmeaning. If photographs could not be read asstories, they could be read as symbols.The decline of narrative painting in the pastcentury has been ascribed in large part to the riseof photography, which "relieved" the painter ofthe necessity of story telling. This is curious,since photography has never been successful atnarrative. Ithas in fact seldom attempted it. Theelaborate nineteenth century montages ofRobinson and Rejlander, laboriously piecedtogether from several posed negatives, attemptedto tell stories, but these works were recognized intheir own time as pretentious failures In the early

S Hawthorne, op. cit., p. 85.6 William M. Ivins, Jr. , Prints end Visual Communication.Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1953, p. 180.7 Ibid. , p . 94.

3


4/6

days of the picture magazines the attempt wasmade to achieve narrative through photographicsequences, but the superficial coherence of thesestories was generally achieved at the expense ofphotographic discovery. The heroicdocumentation of the American Civil War by theBrady group, and the incomparably largerphotographic record of the Second World War,have this in common: neither explained, withoutextensive captioning, what was happening. Thefunction of these pictures was not to make thestory clear, it was to make it real. The great warphotographer Robert Capa expressed both thenarrative poverty and the symbolic power ofphotography when he said, "If your picturesaren't good enough you're not close enough."

The Frame

Since the photographer's picture was notconceived but selected, his subject was nevertruly discrete, never wholly self-contained. Theedges of his film demarcated what he thoughtmost important, but the subject he had shot wassomething else; it had extended in fourdirections. Ifthe photographer's framesurrounded two figures, isolating them from thecrowd in which they stood, it created arelationship between those two figures that hadnot existed before.The central act of photography, the act ofchoosing and eliminating, forces a concentrationon the picture edge-the line that separates infrom out-and on the shapes that are created byit.During the first half-century of photography'slifetime, photographs were printed the same sizeas the exposed plate. Since enlarging wasgenerally impractical the photographer could notchange his mind in the darkroom, and decide touse only a fragment of his picture, withoutreducing its size accordingly. Ifhe hadpurchased an eight by ten inch plate (or worse,prepared it), had carried it as part of his back-bending load, and had processed it, he was notlikely to settle for a picture half that size. A senseof simple economy was enough to make thephotographer try to fill the picture to its edges.The edges of the picture were seldom neat. Partsof figures or buildings or features oflandscapewere truncated, leaving a shape belonging not tothe subject, but (if the picture was a good one) to

4

the balance, the propriety, of the image. Thephotographer looked at the world as though itwere a scroll painting, unrolled from hand tohand, exhibiting an infinite number of croppings---of compositions-as the frame movedonwards.The sense of the picture's edge as a croppingdevice is one of the qualities of form that mostinterested the inventive painters of the latternineteenth century. To what degree thisawareness came from photography, and to whatdegree from oriental art, is still open to study.However, it is possible that the prevalence of thephotographic image helped prepare the groundfor an appreciation of the Japanese print, andalso that the compositional attitudes of theseprints owed much to habits of seeing whichstemmed from the scroll tradition.

TimeThere is in fact no such thing as an instantaneousphotograph. All photographs are time exposuresof shorter or longer duration, and each describesa discrete parcel of time. This time is always thepresent. Uniquely in the history of pictures, aphotograph describes only that period of time inwhich it was made. Photography alludes to thepast and the future only in so far as they exist inthe present, the past through its surviving relics,the future through prophecy visible in thepresent.In the days of slow films and slow lenses,photographs described a time segment of severalseconds or more. Ifthe subject moved, imagesresulted that had never been seen before: dogswith two heads and a sheaf of tails, faces withoutfeatures, transparent men, spreading their dilutedsubstance half across the plate. The fact thatthese pictures were considered (at best) as partialfailures is less interesting than the fact that theywere produced in quantity; they were familiar toall photographers and to all customers who hadposed with squirming babies for family portraits.It is surprising that the prevalence of theseradical images has not been of interest to arthistorians. The time-lapse painting of Duchampand Balla, done before the First World War, hasbeen compared to work done by photographerssuch as Edgerton and Mili, who workedconsciously with similar ideas a quarter-centurylater, but the accidental time-lapse photographs

4


5/6

of the rrineteenth century have been ignored-presumably because they were accidental.As photographic materials were made moresensitive, and lenses and shutters fasterphotography turned to the exploration of rapidlymoving subjects. Just as the eye is incapable ofregistering the single frames of a motion pictureprojected on the screen at the rate of twenty-fourper second, so is it incapable of following thepositions of a rapidly moving subject in life. Thegalloping horse is the classic example. Aslovingly drawn countless thousands of times byGreeks and Egyptians and Persians and Chinese,and down through all the battle scenes andsporting prints of Christendom the horse ran withfour feet extended, like a fugitive from acarousel. Not till Muybridge successfullyphotographed a galloping horse in 1878 was theconvention broken. It was this way also with theflight of birds, the play of muscles on an athlete'sback, the drape of a pedestrian's clothing and thefugitive expressions of a human face.Immobilizing these thin slices of time has been asource of continuing fascination for thephotographer. And while pursuing thisexperiment he discovered something else: hediscovered that there was a pleasure and a beautyin this fragmenting of time that had little to dowith what was happerring. It had to do ratherwith seeing the momentary patterning oflinesand shapes that had been previously concealedwithin the flux of movement. Cartier-Bressondefined his commitment to this new beauty withthe phrase The decisive moment, but the phrasehas been misunderstood; the thing that happensat the decisive moment is not a dramatic climaxbut a visual one. The result is not a story but apicture.

Vantage PointMuch has been said about the clarity ofphotography, but little has been said about itsobscurity. And yet it is photography that hastaught us to see from the unexpected vantagepoint, and has shown us pictures that give thesense of the scene, while withholding itsnarrative meaning. Photographers from necessitychoose from the options available to them, andoften this means pictures from the other side ofthe proscenium showing the actors' backs,pictures from the bird's view, or the worm's, orpictures in which the subject is distorted by

5

extreme foreshorterring, or by none, or by anunfamiliar pattern oflight, or by a seemingambiguity of action or gesture.Ivins wrote with rare perception of the effect thatsuch pictures had on rrineteenth-century eyes:"At first the public had talked a great deal aboutwhat it called photographic distortion ... [But] itwas not long before men began to thinkphotographically, and thus to see for themselvesthings that it had previously taken thephotograph to reveal to their astonished andprotesting eyes. Just as nature had once imitatedart, so now it began to imitate the picture madeby the camera.!"After a century and a quarter, photography'sability to challenge and reject our schematizednotions of reality is still fresh. In his monographon Francis Bacon, Lawrence Alloway speaks ofthe effect of photography on that painter: "Theevasive nature of his imagery, which is shockingbut obscure, like accident or atrocityphotographs, is arrived at by using photography'shuge repertory of visual images ... Uncaptionednews photographs, for instance, often appear asmomentous and extraordinary ... Bacon used thisproperty of photography to subvert the clarity ofpose of figures in traditional painting. ,,9The influence of photography on modempainters (and on modem writers) has been greatand inestimable. It is, strangely, easier to forgetthat photography has also influencedphotographers. Not only great pictures by greatphotographers, but photography-the greatundifferentiated, homogeneous whole of it-hasbeen teacher, library, and laboratory for thosewho have consciously used the camera as artists.An artist is a man who seeks new structures inwhich to order and simplify his sense of thereality oflife. For the artist photographer, muchof his sense of reality (where his picture starts)and much of his sense of craft or structure(where his picture is completed) are anonymousand untraceable gifts from photography itself.The history of photography has been less ajourney than a growth. Its movement has notbeen linear and consecutive but centrifugal.Photography, and our understanding of it, has

S Ibid. , p . 138.9 Lawrence Al loway, Francis Bacon. New York: Solomon R.Guggenheim Foundation, 1963, p. 22.

5


6/6

spread from a center; it has, by infusion,penetrated our consciousness. Like an organism,photography was born whole. Itis in ourprogressive discovery of it that its history lies.

6

6

John_Szarkowski the Photographer's Eye (Text Only) 1966

Documents

Transcript of John_Szarkowski the Photographer's Eye (Text Only) 1966