the Department with a number of acquisitions and
exhibitions. TheNew Documentsshow in 1967 ush-
ered in a new generation of American artists (Lee
Friedlander, Winogrand, and Diane Arbus among
others) many of whose prints MoMA bought. His
energy for publication seemed limitless as the Depart-
ment published a vast number of its own catalogues
espousing quality work by such photographers as
Harry Callahan (Callahan, 1976), Lee Friedlander
(inNew Documents, 1967), Garry Winogrand (Public
Relations, 1977), and Diane Arbus (inNew Docu-
ments, 1967, and her retrospective in 1972) as well as
managing the influential survey of American photo-
graphy since 1960,Mirrors and Windows(1978).
While Szarkowski concentrated on emerging and
contemporary photographers who were quickly
recognized as modern masters, the Department
also occasionally looked back to earlier photogra-
phers. In 1971, an important Walker Evans retro-
spective was mounted that harked back not only to
the first photograph acquired by the Museum in
1930, but to the first photography book that Szar-
kowski himself bought, as he recalled fondly in an
interview in the art and literary magazineGrand
Street. In 1975, Szarkowski organized MoMA’s
second major retrospective of Edward Weston,
(the first had been in 1946) confirming him as a
major influence on twentieth century photography.
Ironically, for a forward-looking director, one of
the most important undertakings of the Depart-
ment under Szarkowski was a historical project. In
1968, the Museum finally acquired the funds to buy
a vast collection of work by Euge`ne Atget (1856–
1927) from Julien Levy and Berenice Abbott. The
cataloguing, preservation, and display of over 5,000
prints, duplicates, and negatives from the collection
took over a decade, led to four exhibitions and to
four volumes ofThe Work of Atget. As well as
having documentary value about historical Paris
and technical value in showing what equipment
was available around the turn of the century,
Atget’s work is simply beautiful.
The selling of the Museum’s air rights and sub-
sequent redevelopment project in the early 1980s
expanded the Museum’s exhibition space. Szar-
kowski used his seniority and stature to obtain
increased storage and display space for the Photo-
graphy Department. Szarkowski hired Susan Kis-
maric as an assistant curator during this period,
and she brought the new space into play with
shows such as British Photography from the
Thatcher Years(1990) and Barbara Kruger’s 1988
Picturing Greatness.
Szarkowski’s achievements at MoMA were
manifold. They included rethinking exhibitions to
allow for heterogeneity and re-shaping the bound-
aries of the art of photography to include indus-
trial, scientific, journalistic, or advertising prints,
with more traditional ‘‘art’’ photography. In taking
this broader view of photography he was steering
away from the narrower artistic and aesthetic qua-
lities of the Photo-Secession tradition or of Stei-
chen’s later years. Szarkowski’s move towards a
more Catholic understanding of photography was
in no way intended to dilute the seriousness of the
field, but rather to include previously overlooked
genres and fields of photography in the gaze of the
collector and the purview of the scholar.The Department of Photography Under Peter
Galassi, 1992–Present Day
In 1992, John Szarkowski stepped down after 30
years of service. In his place he appointed Peter
Galassi, a curator in the Department since 1974
who had been responsible for the influential 1981
exhibitionBefore Photography. In this exhibition
Galassi suggested that photography was not the
product of an arbitrary confluence of cultural and
technological developments but rather a legitimate
inheritor of a particular, albeit minor, pictorial
tradition that predated photography and was evi-
dent in certain late eighteenth century paintings. As
director Galassi has continued to view photogra-
phy as part of an interwoven, organic continuum of
artistic production. As part of ‘‘MoMA2000’’—the
Museum’s millennial review of itself and its sub-
jects—he organized, along with the Director of the
Museum and the other departmental directors, sev-
eral interdisciplinary exhibitions and wrote about
their content and conceptualization.
Galassi wasted no time in stamping his imprima-
tur on the Department. He used the occasion of the
exhibitionAmerican Photography 1890–1965(1997)
to write his own history of both U.S. photography
and photography at MoMA. As well as providing
an invaluable overview to both of these subjects it
explains the tradition that Galassi saw himself fol-
lowing. In 2000, Galassi continued this engagement
with tradition inWalker Evans and Company,an
exhibition that was not simply a Walker Evans
retrospective like Szarkowski’s 1971 show, nor a
nostalgic review of the photographer whose print
was the first to be acquired by MoMA (although it
was symbolically tied to both of those things) but
also a way of showing how views on Evans’ photo-
graphy and its context had changed over the years.
Concentrating on the interconnectedness of art
forms has not deterred Galassi from holding impor-MUSEUM OF MODERN ART OF NEW YORK, THE