Szarkowski Defined Photography as Art
September 2007
NEW YORK—John Szarkowski, 87, whose death July 7 followed a stroke in February, was the director of the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art from 1962 until 1991, but that doesn’t begin to describe his importance. Although his immediate predecessor was Edward Steichen, it was Szarkowski who made MoMA the venue for photography in the United States. He didn’t just ride the photo boom that began in the mid-1970s: He helped shape and direct it.
During his tenure, MoMA both defined and expanded the modern canon. Szarkowski’s first exhibition introduced Jacques-Henri Lartigue, whose turn-of-the-century childhood photos had the innocence and spontaneity of snapshots. With this, he opened the door to other work in the vernacular style, including Eugène Atget’s sublime views of Paris, the subject of a four-part retrospective in the 1980s that was one of Szarkowski’s great curatorial achievements, and William Eggleston’s deceptively artless take on the American South, a major breakthrough for color in 1976. Before he moved on, other photographers he championed—notably Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, who had their first museum exposure in his 1967 “New Documents” show—had become the new establishment, and his vision for the department had come to seem conservative.
But that vision looks much clearer in retrospect, grounded as it was in the no-nonsense understanding of how photographs look and work that Szarkowski, a photographer himself, put forth in a series of survey exhibitions and publications beginning with The Photographer’s Eye in 1964 and culminating in Photography Until Now in 1990. An especially jargon-free writer, his catalog essays are as memorable and authoritative as the shows they accompanied. His vision and his voice remain, undiminished.