The Photographer’s Eye John Szarkowski

The Photographer’s Eye

• The Photographers Eye, by John Szarkowski, was published in 1966. Szarkowski was the Director of Photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art from 1962-1991 and was personally picked by Edward Steichen to be his successor

The Photographer’s Eye

• The book is an attempt to define the characteristics of a photograph

• “What photographs look like, and why they look that way.”

• Argues the importance of looking carefully and bringing every bit of intelligence and understanding as a viewer

Photographs

•Early photographers struggled with the mechanical aspect of photography

•Many emulated other arts such as pictorial painting

• •

Henry Peach Robinson’s Fading Away

TwoWays of Life by Oscar Rejlander

Robinson seamlessly combined five separate negatives to produce this intimate narrative of family tragedy.The scene centers on a bedridden young woman dying of tuberculosis—or possibly of a broken heart, as suggested by the Shakespearean title of a preliminary study,“She Never Told Her Love”.The picture was notorious both for the “artificiality” of its technique and for its subject matter, which was considered too morbid and painfully intimate to be represented photographically. Robinson’s seamless blending of reality and artifice did, however, appeal to Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria, who purchased a print of Fading Away and issued a standing order for every major composite photograph Robinson would make.

The Two Ways of Life was one of the most ambitious and controversial photographs of the nineteenth century. The picture is an elaborate allegory of the choice between vice and virtue, represented by a bearded sage leading two young men from the countryside onto the stage of life. The rebellious youth at left rushes eagerly toward the dissolute pleasures of lust, gambling, and idleness; his wiser counterpart chooses the righteous path of religion, marriage, and good works. Because it would have been impossible to capture a scene of such extravagant complexity in a single exposure, Rejlander photographed each model and background section separately, yielding more than thirty negatives, which he meticulously combined into a single large print.

Photography Characteristics: Made vs.Taken

•Unlike paintings that were “made,” based on traditional skills and theories, photographs were selected, or“taken”

•Photography is defined not by those emulating traditions of painting

•It’s characteristics are shown in the work of those who purposely break from tradition, or who are ignorant of previous tradition

Photography: Art by the Masses

•The dry-plate process expanded the base of photographers

•Roll film made photography available to everyone

•Photography itself began to be the sole influence for new photographers

•With hand-held cameras came new points of view such as snapshots

•Photography created it’s own vision

5 Aspects of Photography• TheThing Itself

• The Detail

• The Frame

• Time

• Vantage Point

The Thing Itself• Photography deals with the actual

• Clearer, permanent version of aspects of the world

• Photograph appears true, lens is impartial, photographer’s role ignored

• Reality is filtered, reduced in size, clarified or exaggerated

Dorothea Lange Destitute Pea Pickers in California (Migrant Mother) Nipomo, California,1936

Photography deals with the actual, though the factuality of a picture, no matter how convincing and unarguable, is different than the reality itself. The subject and the picture are not the same thing, though they seem so afterwards – the image, the photograph, will survive the subject.

Edward Weston

The Detail

• Isolating and documenting fragments gives details meaning and significance

• Details in photography often reveal compelling clarity

• Details relevant in photography were too ordinary to paint

Lorne Resnick Sisters

AGreatDayinHarlemArtKane

AGreatDayinHarlem(DizzyGillespie,RoyEldridge,LesterYoung,TheloniousMonk,GerryMulligan,etal)ArtKane

The Frame• “To quote out of context is the essence of the

photographer’s craft.” • The photographer must decide what to include and

what not to include • The frame creates new relationships between subjects

in the frame by cropping • There are an infinite number of croppings in any given

situation

Eugene Atget, Avenue des Gobelins Paris, France, 1925

The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge. Compositional considerations of line, form and balance extend not only in the four directions suggested by the viewfinder or ground glass edges, but also the spatial considerations of foreground / background relationships – the transformation of a three dimensional world into the flatness of two dimensional. These relationships of the edges, in all directions, reflect the intentional visual and conceptual concerns in how photographic meaning is considered. What is contained within the frame is either energized or passive depending on how these edges are considered, allowing the picture to resonate within the edges and/or beyond them.

Yuri Dojc O King

GordonParksFerryCommuters,StatenIsland,NewYork,1946

Time

•Photographs are a record of the present time of which they were taken

•Photographs are not instantaneous

•They describe shorter or longer lengths of time

•The photographer selects a decisive moment to capture the image

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Behind St. Lazare station Paris, France, 1932

The photograph is static, but the moments of the world flow, interrupted only by the deliberate fragmentation of time by the release of the shutter. This discrete parcel of time is not just a literal moment of time, whether frozen by an exposure of a short duration or the accumulation of movement, but also where the world is transformed by a decisive moment once the shutter is triggered, regardless if that moment of exposure is 1/125th of a second or 6 minutes.

“The decisive moment, it is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression.” -Henri Cartier-Bresson

ElliottErwitt(NewYork,NY)NewYorkCity.2000

GaryWinograd,NewYork,NY1955

Vantage Point

Photography utilizes unusual angles of view:

•Bird’s eye view

•Worm’s eye view

•Foreshortening

•From the back

•Selective focus & depth-of-field

•Ambiguity, obscurity

GordonParksGreasePlantWorker,Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania,1944

Elliott Erwitt / Magnum Photos, New York City, 1974

In equal consideration as the frame, the act of choosing the distance between the subject being photographed and the camera (and photographer) offers the uncanny ability of photography to reveal what our eyes would protest as unattainable with simple human vision – a point of view different from what our eyes perceive.

Onne van der Wal Shaman Ice Boots

JoanJonasLauraWilliams

Summary•‘Photographer’s Eye’ aspects native to Photography

•The Thing Itself

•The Detail

•The Frame

•Time

•Vantage Point

Garry Winogrand