John Szarkowski : Introduction to The Photographer’s Eye

John Szarkowski

•  Photographer, curator, historian, and critic •  Director of Photography at The Museum of

Modern Art, 1962- 1991 •  The Photographer’s Eye is based on a

1964 exhibition and was first published in 1966. It is an investigation of what photographs look like, and why they look that way.

Cornelis Troost ca 1740

Louis Daguerre Boulevard du Temple, Paris, 1838

Paintings: Based on Synthesis

Are Made

Photographs: Based on Selection

Are Taken

“How could this mechanical and mindless process be made to produce pictures meaningful in human terms-

pictures with clarity and coherence and a point-of-view?”

Oscar Rejlander The Two Ways of Life, 1857

after Raphael’s School of Athens

Edward Steichen Self Portrait 1901

Paul Strand, Photograph, New York, 1916

•  The Thing Itself •  The Detail •  The Frame •  Time •  Vantage Point

The Thing Itself

The Thing Itself The photographer learned that “the factuality of his pictures, no matter how convincing and unarguable, was a different

thing than reality itself.”

Lewis Hine Child in Carolina Cotton Mill (a.k.a. The Little Spinner)

1908

“The subject and the picture were not

the same thing, although they

would afterwards seem so.”

Hippolyte Bayard Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man, 1840

Mathew Brady Abraham Lincoln, 1860

Lori Nix, California Forest Fire, 2002

The Detail

The Detail “He could not, outside the studio, pose the truth; he could only record it as he found it, and it was found in nature in a

fragmented and unexplained form- not as a story, but as scattered and suggestive clues.”

Roger Fenton The Valley of the Shadow of Death, 1855

From the Crimean War

“If photographs could not be read as stories, they

could be read as symbols.”

Nick Ut, Vietnam Napalm, 1972

“The function of these pictures was

not to make the story clear, it was to make it real.”

Scott Olson/Getty Images, 2014

Jonathan Bachman, 2016

The Frame

The Frame “The edges of him film demarcated what he thought was most important, but the subject

he had shot was something else; it had extended in four directions.”

Alfred Stieglitz The Steerage 1907

Bill Owens, from Leisure, 1973

William Eggleston Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973

“To quote out of context is the essence of the

photographer’s craft. His central problem is a

simple one: what shall he include, what shall he

reject?”

Time

Time “There is in fact no such things as an instantaneous photograph. All photographs are time exposures, of shorter or longer duration,

and each describes a discrete parcel of time.”

Joseph Nicephore Niepce, View from his window at La Gras, 1826 or 1827

Eadweard Muybridge, 1878

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind the Gare St. Lazare, 1932

Ori Gersht Blow up 2007

Michael Wesley, Still Life, 2012

Vantage Point

Vantage Point “It is photography that has taught us to see from the unexpected

vantage point.”

Aleksandr Rodchenko , Pine Trees, 1927

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) Brooklyn School Children See Gambler Murdered in Street, 1941

Lee Friedlander Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, 1969

Tony Mendoza, 2016