JOHN SZARKOWSKI
American
In 1962, John Szarkowski succeeded Edward Stei-
chen as Director of Photography at the Museum of
Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. He began his
almost 30-year tenure there with extensive training
both as a photographer and a teacher. From the
moment he began working at MoMA, Szarkowski
became a commanding voice, not only in the world
of American photography, but in the larger art
world as he almost single-handedly promoted a
formalist approach toward photography as an
autonomous art form.
Born in Ashland, Wisconsin in 1925, Szarkowski
took an early interest in photography, labeling
himself a professional by the age of 16. Wanting
to also spend time looking at pictures, he decided
to pursue a degree in art history at the University
of Wisconsin at Madison. After graduating in
1948, Szarkowski spent two years in the United
States Army. Upon his release, he worked for a
year as a staff photographer at the Walker Art
Center in Minneapolis, and in 1951, he began to
teach courses in art history and photography at the
Albright Art School in Buffalo, New York.
Still active as a photographer, he applied for and
received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1954 to com-
plete a photographic project on the architecture of
Louis Sullivan.The Idea of Louis Sullivanwas pub-
lished in 1956, and in it, through a series of photo-
graphs taken of Sullivan’s architecture, he explores
how the meaning of function changed in the archi-
tect’s famous phrase, ‘‘form follows function.’’ His
second publication followed two years later. En-
titled The Face of Minnesota, it commemorates
the centennial of Minnesota’s statehood and is
done in a style resembling theNational Geographic.
AlthoughLooking at Photographs(1973) remains
his most widely read publication, Szarkowski’s influ-
ence began withThe Photographer’s Eyeproduced in
conjunction with the 1964 opening of MoMA’s per-
manent photography galleries. The exhibition trav-
eled throughout the United States and was seen by
many; its publication in book form in 1966 brought
Szarkowski’s ideas to an even larger audience. In this
exhibition, Szarkowski laid the groundwork for his
formalist approach to photography through his
exploration of those qualities that he understood as
unique to the medium. He organized the exhibition
around five characteristics: the thing itself, the detail,
the frame, time, and vantage point; and, through
them, he constructed the discourse of photography
as one that is predominately concerned with formal
issues and not with the intent of the photographer.
He explains:
The Photographer’s Eyewas an attempt to try to define
certain issues, certain fundamental issues, that might
begin to offer the armature for a credible vocabulary
that really has to do with photography and not with
how Alfred Stieglitz felt about the smokestacks, or what-
ever else.
(quoted in Stange, 700)
Unlike Steichen, who believed in the social
function of photography, Szarkowski redefined
photography according to a modernist aesthetic.
His formalist reading elevates the medium to an
autonomous art form and in doing so denies the
possibility of external factors such as history, eco-
nomics, or ideology as informing a photograph’s
meaning. Interestingly, in spite of his formalist
stance, Szarkowski did not exclusively promote
the aesthetic value of art photography. Rather,
he maintained that anonymous, news, magazine,
and commercial photography held equal artistic
merit. At the time, this idea was quite revolution-
ary, since many of the field’s practitioners believed
that photographers should distance themselves as
far as possible from the world of commercial and
amateur picture taking. Szarkowski, however,
believed that if photography had certain salient
qualities, then they must reside in all photographs,
regardless of the intention of their makers or their
historical contexts. News photography became
one of the primary means through which he ex-
plored this belief, as his 1973 exhibitionFrom the
Picture Pressattests. A number of critics heralded
Szarkowski as a champion of the ‘‘vernacular tra-
dition’’ of photography, although he received crit-
icism for disregarding the original uses of certain
photographs, particularly those made during the
nineteenth century.
Besides theorizing on the photography’s intrinsic
properties, Szarkowski also helped a number ofSZARKOWSKI, JOHN