John szarkowski biography

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After working as a museum photographer at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, he moved to Buffalo to teach photography. In 1971 he wrote, “The photographer must define his subject with an educated awareness of what it is and what it means; he must describe it with such simplicity and sureness that the result seems an unchallengeable fact, not merely the record of a photographer’s opinion; yet the picture itself should possess a taut athletic grace, an inherent structure, that gives it a life in metaphor.” He continued, “Evans at his best convinces us that we are seeing the dry bones of fact, presented without comment, almost without thought.

Evans kept mum about his role in awarding the Guggenheim Fellowships and, after hearing Szarkowski’s story and viewing the photographs, said something like, “Forget the publisher—those people never understand artists like you and me. This elite was not likely to be found among those who labored to make their pictures look artistic, like Impressionist or Constructivist paintings, for example, nor among those who earned academic degrees in art (propositions he found faintly ludicrous).

Although critics thought the images in the exhibition were unformed, uncomfortable, or artless, Evans’s criteria were operational, just transmuted into a more contemporary guise. “But if one insists in a photograph that is both complex and vigorous it is almost impossible.” Born Thaddeus John Szarkowski on December 18, 1925 in Ashland, WI, he went on receive a degree in art history from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1948.

For accomplished masters of the medium such as André Kertész, Brassaï, Bill Brandt, Harry Callahan, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Irving Penn, an exhibition organized by “the great man” promised a deeper understanding of their achievement.

Even if the state of photographic commentary had not been relatively vacuous when Szarkowski came onto the stage, his opinions would have counted.

Szarkowski grew up on the shores of Lake Superior in Wisconsin and experienced an all-American, small-town youth in which family life, marching bands, baseball, farm folk, photography, music, and fishing commingled with hard work, moral decency, and public service. In a field dominated by journalism and almost devoid of serious critical thought, Szarkowski was a flare of intellect, a lone poet among jobbing professionals.

The Family of Man Fund; © John Szarkowski)

(right: John Szarkowski, Mr. And because the new directorial mode, constructed realities, appropriated pictorial worlds, and borrowed media identities interested him not at all, during his time at MoMA the photography department ignored the work of Jeff Wall, Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, Robert Mapplethorpe, and many other good artists who were technically sophisticated but whose creative schemas lay beyond real life in the province of Art (which Szarkowski saw as a seductive but intellectually empty precinct compounded of artifice and attitude).

That year, when Szarkowski made a trip east only to find his New York publisher less than enthusiastic about his new photographs, he ventured to see whether Evans, whom he venerated but had never met, was in his office at Fortune. After retiring from the museum in 1991, Szarkowski resumed his own career in photography. Evans’s approach eventually became Szarkowski’s essential position on the medium.

1925-2007) United States, 1925-2007

John Szarkowski was an American photographer and curator best known for his role as the director of the Museum of Modern Art’s Photography Department from 1962 through 1991. Because Szarkowski gave dignity to their enterprise and really understood their issues, young photographers were drawn to MoMA during his tenure, and those who were included in his inner circle and exhibitions knew they had secured a place in history.

He recognized that the evolution of the mechanical and technical aspects of the medium molded the options photographers had and that their choices, in the aggregate, created the medium’s history—a stream of images that, as long as it was remembered, became a valuable, usable tradition. The irony was that the man who arguably did the most to win photography’s acceptance as an art form second to none should have found so uncongenial the work of the first generation of practitioners who saw themselves not as photographers but as artists who work in the medium of photography.

After retiring from MoMA in 1991, Szarkowski continued to write about photography, but he also returned to his first love, taking pictures.

He was interested in the medium as a whole, and in his 1964 exhibition and subsequent book, The Photographer’s Eye (1966), he illustrated how the creative issues, such as subject selection, vantage, and frame, were similar whether the camera was wielded by a journeyman, a Sunday hobbyist, or an artist.

Evans was Szarkowski’s critical link back to the documentary tradition of the nineteenth century—to Eugène Atget and Mathew Brady—as well as a prescient scout of the best of contemporary practitioners, among them Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, and Garry Winogrand, all protégés of Evans’s whom Szarkowski presented in his watershed 1967 exhibition, “New Documents.” Like Evans, these artists deftly seized the existential facts of a moment in a way that implied objectivity but actually implicated the photographer’s ideas about the subject, resulting in the sort of credible fictions that qualify as photographic art.