Famed Photo Curator John Szarkowski dies at 81

John Szarkowski, who served as the director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for nearly 30 years, died Saturday in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, at age 81. According to Peter MacGill of the Pace/MacGill Gallery, Szarkowski died of complications from a stroke.
       A very good case could be made that Szarkowski changed photography fundamentally and set the stage for the world we live in now—a world in which photography is commonly acknowledged to be a full-fledged art and a supple, fulsome form of personal expression. The New York Times has a very good obituary about him in today’s edition detailing his long career as both curator and photographer. Happily, it also reveals his acute wit. Unhappily, it did not put on display his genius as a writer, and for me that is where Szarkowski left an indelible mark. Indeed, now that I’m thinking of it, what a marvelous thing it would be to do an entire special issue of American Photo devoted to Szarkowski.

The Times notes that as a curator Szarkowski was unmatched in his understanding of the act of photography and in his perceptions of where photography was heading. After taking over the MoMA job from Edward Steichen in 1962, at the age of 37, Szarkowski went about rethinking what photography could be. He championed the work of a new generation of photographers using their cameras to create a form of personal expression.   
     His “New Documents” show in 1967 featured the work of three such photographers: Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, and Garry Winogrand. In 1976 he featured William Eggleston’s color work in a show that was widely panned by critics. The best part of the Times’s obit, for me, was the inclusion of a quote from the newspaper’s own critic at the time, Hilton Kramer, a notoriously conservative thinker. Kramer wrote, “Mr. Szarkowski throws all caution to the winds and speaks of Mr. Eggleston’s pictures as ‘perfect.’ Perfect? Perfectly banal, perhaps, perfectly boring, certainly.”
    Szarkowski’s most important exhibition might have been the famous “Mirrors and Windows” show, up at MoMA from July 26 to October 2, 1978. A look back at American photography since 1960, the exhibition showed how, as Time magazine put it, that photography had been “swept from the magazine to the museum” and become a legitimate art form.
     Among his several books, my personal favorite is “Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art.” When I started working at this magazine many, many years ago, my boss, Sean Callahan, handed me a copy of the book. It was, he said the best writing ever done on photography. And it was an essential history of the medium. He was right.
     This is Szarkowski writing about William Henry Jackson’s 19th-century documentary work in Yellowstone: “Jackson had the imagination to recognize the magnitude of his opportunity. His subject matter was new, and unburdened by the weight of earlier successful pictures. He worked exuberantly and confidently, with a sure grasp of the essential qualities of his medium. He loved the grandeur of the wild Rockies, and the adventure of trying to describe the place clearly and simply.”
     Writing of Lewis Hine’s photographs of the poor, Szarkowski pointed out that “Much of Hine’s work is not a protest but a celebration of people who had nerve, skill, muscle, and tenacity. There is in his pictures little pity and much love and respect for those who were casually called the common people.”
     You can understand Szarkowski’s ideal when he writes of the work of Eugene Atget, whose work he finds “unique on two levels.”
    “He was the maker of a great visual catalogue of the fruits of French culture, as it survived in and near Paris I the first quarter of this century,” writes Szarkowski. “He was in addition a photographer of such authority and originality that his work remains a bench mark against which much of the most sophisticated contemporary photography measures itself. Other photographers had been concerned with describing specific facts (documentation), or with exploiting their individual sensibilities (self-expression). Atget encompassed and transcended both approaches when he set himself the task of understanding and interpreting in visual terms a complex, ancient, and living tradition.”
--David Schonauer