This is a featured article for the topic curatorship.
John Szarkowski has a formidable and well-earned reputation. He was born (in 1925) and educated in Ashland, Wisconsin, taking a degree from the University of Wisconsin, where he majored in art history, in 1948. He began photographing as a boy and considered himself a photographer from the time he decided, at about 16, that he was not a clarinet player. He helped out at a portrait studio while at college, and worked 1948-51 as a staff photographer at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, where he held his first solo show. His early photographs suggest strong interests in Edward Weston and Walker Evans. He was indeed absorbed at college by Evans's American Photographs (1938) and by Fifty Photographs by Edward Weston (c. 1947). He was also fascinated by the Kindergarten Chats of the architect Louis Sullivan, originally published in 1901-2 and reissued in 1947. Szarkowski moved on to the Albright Art School in Buffalo, New York, as an instructor in photography, history of art, and design in 1951. He set himself the task of photographing Sullivan's 1894-5 Guaranty (now Prudential) Building in the city. His portfolio of fifteen photographs of the building was the basis of his successful application to the Guggenheim Fellowship for funds to make the photographs for his first book, The Idea of Louis Sullivan (1956). This was a new kind of architectural photography, one that paid exact attention not only to the ‘art-facts’ of the buildings, but also their ‘life-facts’—meaning what their users had felt about them, or built around them. In Szarkowski's hands, architectural photography became a powerful critical medium, not only a descriptive one. His vigorous and vivid prose style also arrived in his first book. The Guaranty Building ‘was old and dirty and largely lost among its newer, larger neighbours. Like a diamond in a pile of broken glass, it stopped few passersby’. Szarkowski's second book, The Face of Minnesota (1958), developed his writing and his photography, which demonstrated his skill in many branches of the art including action photography and colour. Already in 1952 his work had been acquired by MoMA, New York, and in 1961 he received a second Guggenheim Fellowship—to photograph the Quetico Wilderness Area—and held a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. He seems, now, to have been the obvious choice to succeed Edward Steichen as director of the department of photography at the museum. He took the department and photographic studies as a whole to new heights over the next decades. While doing so—the better to serve the medium at large—Szarkowski gave up his own practice as a photographer. Szarkowski's extraordinary roster of exhibitions while at MoMA (many of which toured nationally and internationally) began with his rediscovery of Jacques-Henri Lartigue (Lartigue's first exhibition) in 1963, followed by The Photographer and the American Landscape the same year. The Photographer's Eye (1964) concerned the fundamental formal issues facing photographers, while André Kertész (1964) offered the first critical appraisal of a major master. The same year saw the opening of the Edward Steichen Galleries and Study Center, where many photographers, historians, critics, and fans have begun and continued to learn about the medium. Photography was not considered, except by very few aficionados and institutions, a collectable medium at this period. Exhibitions celebrated Dorothea Lange (1966), Brassaï (1968), Cartier-Bresson (1968), Bill Brandt (1969), E. J. Bellocq (1970), and Walker Evans (1971). As well as assembling a modernist canon, Szarkowski was alert to the lively talents of his own generation. New Documents (1967) introduced Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand. The early death of Arbus in 1971 prompted the immensely moving memorial exhibition of her work at MoMA in 1972. Looking at Photographs (1973), accompanied by an often-reprinted book, showed a new audience how to acquaint themselves with individual photographs and the traditions to which they belong. New Japanese Photography (1974) introduced major new talents—including Domon, Fukase, Hosoe, Moriyama, and Tomatsu—to a Western audience for the first time. Photographs by William Eggleston (1976) was accompanied by William Eggleston's Guide, the first monograph on a colour photographer published by any art museum. Other shows surveyed science photography (Once Invisible, 1967), news photographs (From the Picture Press, 1973), and American photography of the 1960s and 1970s—Mirrors and Windows (1978). An even more monumental effort was to come. In the 1980s Szarkowski and Maria Morris Hambourg brought out a four-volume study, The Work of Atget, which set a new standard for the high fidelity of the reproductions and for scholarship. The books are based on Berenice Abbott's Atget collection, which was surely Szarkowski's major coup in terms of acquisitions for MoMA. Many other photographers, from many countries and traditions, have benefited from acquisition, display, and publication during Szarkowski's tenure. He concluded his career there with a spectacular survey, Photography until Now (1990), which gave a new reading of photographic history based on technological innovation. After retirement from the Modern in 1991, Szarkowski resumed his career as photographer, publishing Mr Bristol's Barn (1997). This study of a barn on Szarkowski's property in upstate New York has intriguing stylistic connections with the late work of Alfred Stieglitz, which Szarkowski discussed in Alfred Stieglitz at Lake George (1996). In recent years Szarkowski has regularly taken his 4 × 5 in camera on trips with like-minded friends and colleagues, photographing in such locations as Texas, Nebraska, and Upper Michigan. His early and recent photographs have been exhibited by PaceMacGill Gallery, New York. Szarkowski's passion for the medium, his judicious eye, elegance as an exhibition maker, subtlety as a photographer, and eloquence as a writer—all these have had an incalculable influence on the understanding of photography. One could say that he found the medium brick and left it marble, except that he has shown us that photography has been extraordinary material all along.
