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 John Szarkowski, Sarah Lake, 1962
John Szarkowski, Winesap from Barn, 1997
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Eminent curator shows artist side
came first
By Dan Tranberg
John Szarkowski is widely known as a career maker.
As director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from
1962 to 1991, he introduced some of the greatest photographers of the
20th century.
But long before he accepted that position, he was a photographer —
not an amateur, but a dead-serious artist with a distinctive voice and
a distinguished career.
Much as his tremendous success as a curator obscured his personal artwork,
Szarkowski is making up for lost time with a major traveling exhibition
and accompanying publication that proudly declare him as being, first
and foremost, an artist.
Lavishly illustrated with photographs dating from the mid-1940s through
2002, the book “John Szarkowski: Photographs” is peppered
with snippets of letters written to various friends, family members and
professional acquaintances, offering valuable insights into his artistic
mind.
Laid out to correspond to works produced at roughly the same time, the
letters help greatly in portraying him as a creative force whose concern
for quality and integrity always has been paramount.
In a 1956 letter to the University of Minnesota Press, for instance, Szarkowski
politely declined an offer to publish a book of his photographs because
the commission that was to underwrite the project wanted to approve or
reject individual images.
After many negotiations, the press published the book “The Face
of Minnesota” two years later. In 1958, it appeared on The New York
Times’ best-seller list for eight weeks.
Together with works from an earlier book, “The Idea of Louis Sullivan”
(1956), images from Szarkowski’s Minnesota series assert his artistic
position as a visual historian. Looking at his subjects from a wide range
of perspectives, he seeks to create a lively experience for the viewer
— one that reveals commonplace subjects in an entirely new way.
This approach is carried through Szarkowski’s post-MoMA works, one
series of which depicts apple trees and another, desert flora.
In each case, he approaches his subject as if it were something new in
the world, something far richer than we previously realized, something
we need to look at carefully and closely.
It’s no coincidence that this is essentially what he did as a curator,
exposing the world to photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Henri Cartier-Bresson,
Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Harry Callahan, William Eggleston, Ansel Adams,
Irving Penn and Garry Winogrand.
Every one of these artists now is considered a master of 20th-century
photography. That became the case when Szarkowski declared it so.
In the same way, his pictures, regardless of their subject, encourage
us to look with our minds as well as our eyes and to see the true complexity
of the visible world.
The exhibition “John Szarkowski: Photographs” is on view at
the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through Sunday, May 15. It will
travel to four other venues, including the Museum of Modern Art in New
York, where it will open Feb. 1, 2006.
John Szarkowski: Photographs
By John Szarkowski.
Bulfinch Press, 156 pp., $60
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This article appeared in The Plain
Dealer, March 27, 2005
© 2007 Dan Tranberg. All rights reserved.
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