Eyes Wide Open: John Szarkowski –
An influential photography curator and writer discusses some of the
medium’s key figures and exhibitions
By
Mark Durden, Art in America, May, 2006
Re-posted from
AMERICAN SUBURB X (ASX) Link
Mark
Durden: Could you say something about how you saw your role at MOMA
when you were appointed as Edward Steichen’s successor in 1962? You came
to the post as a successful practitioner. Is it appropriate to see your
role as continuing the concerns of Beaumont Newhall? I was thinking
here of the importance of “straight” photography. Your appointment
indicated a radical shift from the concerns of Steichen.
John
Szarkowski: Newhall and Steichen and I were different people, with
different talents, characters, limitations, histories, problems and axes
to grind. We held the same job at very different times, which means
that it was not really the same job. Nevertheless, I think that we held
similar basic ideas about a curator’s responsibilities. I’m sure that we
all felt that it was our job to try to recognize what was good–what was
most vital–in photography’s past and present, and to bring that work,
at its best and as clearly as we could, to its potential audience. Since
we were different people working in different times we interpreted that
charge in somewhat different ways, but surely we all regarded ourselves
as critics and teachers, not as census takers
Perhaps
Newhall and Steichen, consciously or otherwise, felt more compelled
than I to be advocates for photography, whereas I – largely because of
their work – could assume a more analytic, less apostolic attitude.
Their curatorial styles were, of course, quite different: Newhall’s was
quite straitlaced, while Steichen was often being a showman and an
artist at the same time that he was being a curator. His big didactic
shows–especially “The Family of Man”–were basically Steichen’s own works
of art, rather than exhibitions of art works in the traditional sense.
He was under no illusion about the quality of the individual parts from
which he wove these tapestries.
But it should be understood that
the museum’s priority in the field of photography was first of all due
to the work of Alfred Barr, who asked Newhall – then 27 years old, an
amateur of photography, and the museum’s librarian – what photography
exhibition he, Newhall, thought the museum should do in the spring of
1936. Newhall thought a minute and said perhaps a history show should
come first, and Barr said all right, why don’t you do that.
The
year after Newhall’s epoch-making history show of 1937, “Photography,
1839-1937,” the museum mounted the perhaps equally significant “American
Photographs,” an exhibition of work by
Walker Evans,
accompanied by a beautifully made publication of the same name. I am
aware of no earlier monograph on a photographer as an artist by any art
museum anywhere, and the book remains possibly the most influential
photography book to date. And yet it seems to have been done wholly
without the involvement of Newhall. It was apparently the work of
Lincoln Kirstein,
who might well also have paid for it. Kirstein was not a member of the
staff, but of a very energetic and engaged committee of young, rich and
knowledgeable amateurs who were frequently well ahead of the older
generation (often their parents, aunts or uncles) who served on the
museum’s board. During its first decade and more, the museum was rich in
cabals, splinter groups and ad hoc committees, which Barr generally
made skillful use of, and controlled, precariously, by the strength of
his intellect and moral energy.
The purpose of this apparent
digression is to point out that no curator is as independent as he or
she might feel when the work is going well. The job at hand is itself a
product of what has been done so far–and not done–and of a body of
understanding and good will that defines what an institution is willing
to consider. I have great respect for the achievements of both Newhall
and Steichen at the museum, but obviously those achievements were
conditioned not only by their talents and ambitions, but by the nature
of the museum in which they found themselves.
MD: Who were the influential writers on photography at that time?
JS:
Serious writing on photography in 1962 was extremely rare, perhaps even
more rare than it is today. Even pretentious but unserious writing on
photography, which we now have in such abundance, was rare then.
I
will speak here only of writing in English, since that was all I read.
Most of the best writing on photography that was available in 1962 had
been written by photographers, but most of that was available only to
those with access to first-rate libraries, and some knowledge of how to
use them. The best early writing in English on Eugene Atget, for
example, was written by Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans and Ansel Adams,
but only that of Abbott was reasonably widely available in book form.
Thirty years after he had written on Atget, Evans wrote, briefly but
perfectly, on
Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus, and died with a perfect critical average.
In 1956 Beaumont Newhall produced a little book,
On Photography: A Source Book of Photo History in Facsimile
[Watkins Glenn, N.Y., Century House], which reprinted a score or more
of articles chosen from throughout the history of the medium. To those
lucky few photographers into whose hands this little book fell, it was a
glimpse into a foreign world–a world in which the history of
photography was richer and more contentious than it was in Newhall’s own
History. Nevertheless, the importance of Newhall’s 1949
The History of Photography
cannot be overestimated. The book was genealogically the third edition
of the catalogue that Newhall had produced for his 1937 history show at
MOMA, but the 1949 book contains, for the first time, a reasonably
coherent and persuasive narrative that tells the story of photography
not as a series of technical inventions, but as a picture-making
tradition. The introduction of photography into the curricula of
American colleges and universities would have been very difficult
without some intellectually respectable history text, which Newhall
supplied.
Peter Pollack
in 1958 followed Newhall’s basic story line, as did Helmut and Alison
Gersheim in 1969, and Naomi Rosenblum (and others) later, in spite of
the structural problems that should have been long since obvious even to
very comfortable minds.
John Szarkowski, New York City
Most
photographers of even modest ambition wrote at least once in their
lives about their own work. They wrote their credos–brief declarations
of their honorable intentions–when they had their first exhibitions, and
then retired from writing. Most of these cris de coeur were
unmistakably sincere, and a few were cogent. Almost all have been lost
to public view except for those gathered together by Nathan Lyons in his
book
Photographers on Photography (1966).
In
a few cases photographers’ writings on their own work became highly
influential. Among younger working photographers, Cartier-Bresson’s
introductory essay in
The Decisive Moment
(1952) had constituted something close to an article of faith, until
the authority of that text was undermined to some degree by Robert
Frank’s
Statement of 1958,
which made it clear that working for magazines was not an option for
photographers who had achieved adulthood. Edward Weston had stopped
writing his
Daybooks a
generation earlier, but the first volume in book form was not published
until 1961, and it became a very popular inspirational text, not only
for its frequently penetrating thought on the art of photography, but
for its suggestion that creative photography and sexual adventure were
almost inevitable bedfellows.
In case someone might think that
writing is the primary conduit of influence on photographers, it should
be pointed out that the photographs of Cartier-Bresson, Frank and Weston
were an incomparably greater influence than their writings. There were
other very significant figures, such as Alexei Brodovich, the art
director of Harper’s Bazaar, who wrote nothing, but was of great
influence because of what he published and how good he made it look on
the page.
Although Newhall was deeply committed to the work of
several important living photographers, he unfortunately seldom wrote
about their work. Perhaps there was an implicit division of labor
between Newhall and his wife Nancy Parker Newhall, an understanding that
he would stick to historical subjects and she to the living, where a
certain inclination toward unconsidered enthusiasm, plus an occasional
tendency toward purple prose, were surely less of a liability than they
would have been with historical subjects. Her short but pioneering books
on Paul Strand and Edward Weston [1945 and 1946, respectively, both
Museum of Modern Art] were the first monographs on either photographer
by any museum. Later she made common cause with Ausel Adams, both to
advance and celebrate Adams’s work, and perhaps by inference to
establish the inferiority of work that did not meet the standards set by
Stieglitz, Weston, Strand and Adams.
Writing on photography was
at that time generally considered something for the hobby page of
popular periodicals. Consider the essay that James Agee wrote for a book
of photographs by Helen Levitt. The piece, titled “A Way of Seeing,”
was written, I’d guess, in the early ’50s, but the book could not find a
publisher, even with Agee’s essay, until long after his death. [Titled
identically to Agee's article, the volume was finally published in 1965
by The Viking Press, New York.] Surely this essay is one of the very
best things ever written on photography, but even now it is unknown by
young photographers.
As far as the papers and magazines are
concerned, I think that perhaps less was expected then of
journalist-critics. Journalists were supposed to provide accurate
reportage and relevant but provisional commentary, but they did not have
to pretend, once a week, to know and to understand everything about
everything. Such expectations are disastrous for the writers’ own
intellectual lives, and a deep disservice both to the subjects whom they
write about and to their readers. It is difficult to believe that the
papers do not understand this; perhaps they regard their art critics
merely as a part of the entertainment business.
MD: When did you first encounter John A. Kouwenhoven’s
Made In America?
What was its importance in helping shape your response to photography?
I’m thinking of his idea of the vernacular and how you adapt this to
your discussion of photography, especially with regard to the work of
Walker Evans.
JS: John Kouwenhoven’s great book was published in
1948, and I read it shortly afterwards, when I was staff photographer at
the Walker Art Center, an institution that took good design very
seriously, even as it affected the most ordinary objects. The book was
enormously important to me because it showed how the categories of
official and vernacular art were only provisionally discrete, that they
were mutually permeable; that high art and serious craft profitably
influenced each other not through the mechanism of copying but by the
absorption of organizing principles. Evans made it clear that he found
in commercial postcards, in newsreels, in the work of real estate and
insurance photographers, clues pointing toward a style that would serve
his interests better than the lush textures and elegant patterns of the
high art photographers. Edward Weston confessed by the early ’30s that
he finally found the courage to adopt certain technical aspects that he
found beautiful in the fundamentally tedious work of commercial
photographers.
MD: In “The Photographer’s Eye” catalogue (1966)
you acknowledge Kouwenhoven but speak of the interrelation between the
fine-art and functional photographic traditions. My understanding of
Kouwenhoven’s thesis is that he equates a fine-art tradition with a
European esthetic tradition, from which he is keen to differentiate
American arts and design.
JS: I’m afraid that you are misreading
Kouwenhoven’s meaning, or rather, reading only the top layer of it. In
America, the cultivated tradition came from Europe–where else?–but once
it took root here the same kind of reciprocal challenge, argument and
interchange between the refined and the new took place in any print shop
or pottery. The basic opposition in Kouwenhoven’s argument is not
between the European and the American, but between the refined and the
new.
MD: In relation to the importance you give to the specific
qualities of a medium, did you see your approach to photography as close
to Clement Greenberg’s modernist account of painting? Were you in
agreement with Greenberg’s writings on photography? I was thinking of
his distinction between Edward Weston and Walker Evans. How Weston was
too arty for him. Yet at the same time, Greenberg would have nothing to
do with such “low” cultural forms as amateur photographs, in which you
are interested.
JS: I can’t remember when I first read Greenberg.
In general I thought he was excellent on what he liked, and bad on what
he didn’t. I think there was a tendency among the best New York
intellectuals in those days to feel that a problem should be
definitively solved in six pages, so that one could proceed to other
interesting questions–the True Marxian Error, or the secret of urban
planning. On Evans, Greenberg is correct in insisting on the importance
of the literary (allusive) content of the work, but seems not quite to
have understood how important it was to Evans to get the picture
precisely right in plastic terms–that is, to make it beautiful.
MD:
Throughout your writings on photography you have a fascination with
anonymous and amateur photography. What is so important about these low
and popular uses of the medium? Did the vernacular forms indicate a
purity lacking in more self-conscious artistic uses of the medium? Did
it help shape and define your esthetic against more fine-art uses of the
medium?
JS: I am afraid that you have misunderstood my views. I
am not especially interested in anonymous photography, or pictorialist
photography, or avant-garde photography, or in straight, crooked or any
other subspecific category of photography; I am interested in the
entire, indivisible, hairy beast–because in the real world, where
photographs are made, these subspecies, or races, interbreed shamelessly
and continually. Those who would like to build a wall between poetic
photography and prosaic photography will be no more successful now than
Stieglitz was at the beginning of the last century, before he realized
that he had been fighting the wrong war, on the wrong field.
It
is, of course, true that an enormously larger number of photographs have
been made by dumb amateurs, commercial drudges, half-sober news
photographers, celebrity merchants, real-estate salesmen, etc., than by
photographers with clear and clean artistic intentions–which suggests
that the former groups have likely made a great many pictures that might
appeal to those of us interested in what photographs can look like, and
in how they may contain and convey meaning.
It is important to
remember that an anonymous photographer is simply a photographer whose
name we have lost, perhaps temporarily. When we recover it, and find out
the name of his town and his wife (or her husband), we can begin
writing dissertations about him or her, but the work has not changed.
Part
of the problem is doubtless our difficulty in accepting the fact that
luck is a great and powerful force in photography; we tend to be
interested only in intention, because it makes the enterprise feel more
important. I think it would be just as important-and less boring–if we
accepted the fact that luck is everywhere active, if not determinant,
and that the world would be pretty gray without it.
MD: I get the
sense from your writings of a clear group of key figures whose work you
are especially intrigued by: Brady, O’Sullivan, Atget, Walker Evans,
Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, William Eggleston. A
simplicity and directness of the use of the camera could be said to
characterize all their work: a respect for actuality, no embellishment.
This certainly identifies a realist use of the medium, which could be
seen to open up a much more complex and rich understanding of
photography than the limiting implications of terms like formalism,
which tend to get used pejoratively to label your writings and
contribution to the history of photography.
JS: When critics don’t
know what to say about a good photographer who uses the camera simply
and directly they say that the photographer uses the camera simply and
directly. In fact, most ordinary and bad photographers also use the
camera simply and directly. Even the most ambitious
photographers–whether or not they are good artists–use the camera simply
and directly. Robert Mapplethorpe used the camera simply and directly,
but he was, alas, not really an interesting photographer. The whole
company of Arbus imitators, in the years after her death, thought they
could do what she had done by using the camera simply and directly.
Unfortunately they were simple and direct people, whereas she was
complex and patient.
It is true that I am very much interested in
the photographers you list. (Brady perhaps deserves an asterisk; he
stands to photography a little as James I does to the English Bible. The
people who worked for him were on average very good, and O’Sullivan and
Barnard, for example, were extraordinary.) Nevertheless, I am not
interested in these people because they used the camera simply and
directly. Why, unless they were trying to earn their MFA degree under a
very obtuse professor, would they use it any other way? I am interested
in them because of the playful eccentricity of their work or its gravity
and justice, or the disinterested precision of their eyes, and the
acuity of their minds and the depth of their passion, or the sweetness
of their sympathy for the wonders and terrors of the world. One might
say that I am interested in them as artists.
The fact that I have
exhibited and written on some photographers and not on others is to some
degree a matter of historical accident, and of competition. When I came
to the museum I wanted to do shows on Paul Strand and Gene Smith,
neither of which I got to do. Michael Hoffmann got Strand’s commitment
and did an immense show at Philadelphia (1971), which I thought quite
bad. I doubt that the fault was basically Hoffmann’s, except to the
degree that he allowed Strand to have his way. My negotiations with
Smith went on most of one summer, mostly late at night in various
Mexican restaurants. Often I thought we had reached an agreement, but on
the next day that would prove an illusion. Finally it became clear that
Smith simply was incapable of making any commitments in advance, and
our conversations stopped. Some years later he did the show that he
wanted to do at the International Center of Photography in New York. It
was, in my view, much too big, unfocused, filled with last-minute
inspirations, revisions, improvisations and approximations. I did not
regret that it was not shown at MOMA.
In other ways also, the
shows and books that a curator does are to some degree the product of
chance. If I had been unsuccessful in acquiring Berenice Abbott’s Atget
collection for the museum, we would have been unable to study it as
intensively as we did, and a great deal of time, money and gallery space
would presumably have been available for other projects. If Nancy
Newhall were still alive I would not have had the chance to do “Ansel
Adams at One Hundred.” If I had known Brassai a little better a little
earlier, it might have been I who was asked to write the essay for the
museum’s 1968 monograph, rather than Lawrence Durrell, whose piece did
not, I think, amount to much. I have often lectured on Edward Weston,
whose work was the first that I loved deeply and spontaneously, but the
opportunity to write in depth on him never arose. I do greatly admire
the list that you offer, but I also greatly admire Harry Callahan and
Alfred Stieglitz and Irving Penn and Ansel Adams and Bob Adams and
Dorothea Lange and Wright Morris and others on whom I have also written,
as well as many others on whom I have not.
Of all the people on
your list, surely none was less simple and direct, as a person, than
Evans. He was complex, sophisticated, secretive, unpredictable and
capable of deviousness, none of which affected his superior manners or
his loyalty as a friend–although that loyalty was expressed according to
a code that remained resolutely secret.
How direct and simple,
then, is the 1924 image of stamped tin artifacts, the first picture in
Part II of “American Photographs”? What is the meaning of this carefully
depicted trash pile? Or more accurately, what was it that made it for
Evans a sight worthy of contemplation, worth remembering with precision,
that made it a subject rather than (like most trash piles) a
non-subject? Is it simply a little joke, later to become a standard
sophomoric conceit, about the naive pretentiousness of American culture,
that which seemed to suggest one could adopt Greek virtue by stamping
pilasters into tin; or is it an elegy to the early death of such high
(if naive) ambitions, or is it merely an observation on the speed with
which the modern world discards its fashions, or might it be in some
small part a record of a piece of work that he found, in that light, a
beautiful drawing?
Perhaps the point is this: one does not choose
to write about photographers who illustrate one’s point of view. The
process is almost the reverse: one’s point of view is formed by the work
one chooses to write about, because it is challenging, mysterious,
worthy of study, fun. One does not choose new friends because they
exemplify virtues that one most admires; one chooses them because they
are interestingly different than the friends one already has.
I
suppose that the people who accuse me of formalism are about half right.
I am interested in photography as a picture-making system, and that is a
formal issue, but in the photography that I most admire the structure
has become so deeply embedded in the picture that it is not possible to
consider the two things separately.
MD: I was intrigued by your
essay on Irving Penn (1984). What seems to interest you is how he goes
against the glamour of fashion photography, with his use of functional
and plain backdrops and strategic uses of “realist” details. Could you
say something about his importance to you?
JS: Penn has been
professionally part of the world of fashion for more than half a
century, by which time one might say that it is part of his quotidian
life. I would not say that he “goes against” glamour, but that he
continually reinvents it. Glamour and familiarity are incompatible;
glamour requires some element of strangeness or mystery, or even of
danger, which is why ball masks and fans are glamorous. (I think a great
man might in fact be a hero to his valet, but he could not be
glamorous.) Penn introduced a new strangeness to glamour even in the
character of his drawings–of the nervous, ambiguous quality of his line,
which is often broken and angular where one would expect it to be
smooth and languid. One would hardly have thought that a cigarette butt
could be glamorous, but Penn’s are positively regal. Penn also
introduced an unfamiliar hint of decadence into fashion photography, but
he did it in a subtle, sophisticated way, with untraceable poison in an
eyedropper, not with a battle-ax, as did (for example) Guy Bourdin.
MD:
With Eggleston and Winogrand, especially, there seems to be an
incorporation of the amateur photograph into the way they take their
pictures. With Evans there is a respect for the amateur or jobbing
professional photographer, but, at a distance, his pictures do not
formally take on the implications of these low vernacular photographs,
maintaining instead a classical austerity. As you have observed, the
vernacular is adapted by Eggleston, incorporated into the form of his
pictures. I was wondering what you thought of the current revival of
interest in the work of Eggleston and Winogrand and how it seems to be
celebrated partly in conjunction with the work of a whole group of
artists much more overtly playing with a snapshot aesthetic–Nan Goldin,
for example, and Richard Billingham or Wolfgang Tillmans. Are these
latter photographers furthering the formal evolution of photography?
JS:
I am stunned by the idea of a revival of interest in Winogrand and
Eggleston. Who had lost interest in these remarkable artists? Well, one
might say that the critics had, because of their notoriously short
attention span. But in fact very few critics paid serious attention to
Winogrand or Eggleston 20 years ago; those few who did remained
interested.
There has been a good deal of confusion about the
terms amateur photography, snapshot photography, vernacular photography,
and doubtless others, used interchangeably to indicate pictures more or
less dissimilar from, say, those that Edward Steichen
characteristically made in his studio with his 8 by 10. Perhaps some
tentative distinctions might be useful.
I suggest that we could
use the term snapshot to apply to the kind of photograph that is
characteristically seen in family albums. These pictures are totemic,
ceremonial, eidetic, and are generally most interested in whatever
occupies the center of the image. There have been a number of books that
illustrate the subject matter and the pictorial character of this
subspecies of photography, including Douglas Nickel’s
Snapshots
[San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1998]. At least 90 percent of the
pictures in Nickel’s book satisfy the definition above. Snapshots of the
classic period are in black and white, and made in natural light. With
color and flash-on-camera the form begins to lose its innocence. The
cameras that made classic snapshots had viewfinders which were only
marginally better than nothing, almost always they included a great deal
less than the negative. (My 2C Autographic Kodak, ca. 1918, gives about
30 percent more–linear–on the negative than the viewfinder indicates.)
Thus, if an uncropped contact print of such a picture has interesting
edges, it is an accident. The photographer was interested only in the
center, and his camera kept the picture’s edges a secret.
Obviously
if we also include within the term snapshot the work of the child
Jacques Lartigue, or Alfred Stieglitz with his Graflex (not to mention
the work of very sophisticated contemporary photographers), then the
word’s meaning has become so inclusive as to be useless for the purpose
of making distinctions. Lartigue was from the beginning interested in
the design of the entire picture, and if it was unsatisfactory he
cropped it to make it better. Stieglitz’s marvelous Graflex showed him
his picture precisely to its edges.
Another kind of vernacular
photography is exemplified in the wonderful book that Larry Sultan and
Mike Mandell did 20 years ago called
Evidence,
which showed us a hilariously devious selection of pictures made by
competent professionals who knew what their picture would look like, and
who didn’t have time to worry about what it meant. In my youth these
were called nuts-and-bolts photographers. They normally had very good
lenses and reasonably good techniques, and sometimes they were
intelligent and had good eyes, in which case their work is simply
wonderful to look at, for another photographer. The best of these
photographers were naive only in the sense that they were not playing
the same game that Stieglitz was playing.
The term “amateur”
photographer should probably be dropped altogether, unless one is
willing to explain which of its many meanings one is using. If one means
those who are not professionals–meaning by professionals those who
during most of their lives supported themselves through the practice of
photography–then it would seem that most of photography’s heroes from
the first half of the 20th century (to provide a little historical
distance to the question) were amateurs. The conspicuous exceptions that
occur to me would be Eugene Atget, Lewis Hine, Edward Steichen and
Ansel Adams. Weston and Alvarez-Bravo also supported themselves, more or
less, by photography, but not by doing the work that we know, or that
they would of their own free will have shown us. Among the
amateurs–those who supported themselves, most of the time, with income
from other sources–we might tentatively (and alphabetically) put
Cartier-Bresson, Evans, Lange, Moholy-Nagy, Sheeler, Stieglitz and
Strand, for starters.
So, to get to your question: In my view,
Evans, Winogrand and Eggleston were alert to all and any clues, hints
and sources that crossed their path, whether encountered in the Louvre
or the postcard stand, but I do not think that there is with any of them
an attempt to adopt and adapt any vernacular style or method. Rather,
it was a matter of allowing into the mix of picture-making potentials
subject matter and techniques that had not been considered by the
previous generations to be the proper concern of serious photography.
In
the case of Evans, it seems to me adequately documented that the great
example for him was Atget. Winogrand was already an interesting
photographer when Dan Weiner told him that he should look at
American Photographs.
Afterward Winogrand said that it was the first time that he had
understood that photography could deal with the concerns of
intelligence.
Where Eggleston came from is a mystery to me, but it
was not out of the head of Zeus. He was a serious art student before he
became interested in photography. In summary, I don’t think that any of
the three would have taken kindly to the suggestion that they were
playing with, or otherwise engaged in, the snapshot aesthetic, whatever
that might mean. As a matter of courtesy, let us extend the same
exemption to the other photographers on your list.
MD: The sheer
productivity of Eggleston and Winogrand raises disconcerting questions
about esthetic judgment. The implications of their work don’t seem that
far from the consciously anti-aesthetic gestures of Baldessari’s use of
photography through appropriation of snapshots. Or would you say this is
going too far?
JS: If I understand your question, you are
suggesting that fecund artists are likely to be inferior to artists who
produce little. According to that test, Paul Dukas should be considered
at least 100 times greater than Haydn. (I am assuming that Dukas wrote
at least a few things other than the Apprentice, although I don’t know
what.) I doubt that you would agree to so ludicrous a proposition, but I
really don’t know what else you might mean. Surely the best artists, by
and large, have been very productive; it is difficult to think of one
who was stingy with his talent and energy. I don’t know whether or not
Eggleston is a prodigious shooter; Winogrand certainly did expose a
great deal of film, and until his very last years he had an astonishing
percentage of successes, even by his own high standards. The proof sheet
containing the famous picture of the crippled beggar at the American
Legion Convention includes three or four other pictures–never printed by
Winogrand–that most photographers would count among their prizes.
Baldessari
is a good artist who uses photography in a way that effectively serves
his artistic needs. I would guess that he does not care whether the
photographs he uses were made by him or by someone else, since they are
in either case instrumental to a meaning that is not contained by the
photograph alone.
MD: In “Mirrors and Windows” (1978) you made the
claim, in relation to photos from the Vietnam War, that photography’s
failure to explain large public issues has become increasingly clear. Do
you still hold this view?
JS: Yes, I still hold that view.
Perhaps I should add that photographs explain very little, even of small
private issues. Photographs show what things look like, at a given
moment from a certain vantage point, and sometimes this knowledge
proposes the most interesting and cogent questions.
MD: In many
senses much of what has been defined as postmodern photography proceeded
from an attempt to open up art to large public and social issues, to
counter what was seen as the predominantly hermetic and esthetic
orientation of modernist practices and discourses. To what extent did
you see the work of artists like Victor Burgin, Barbara Kruger and
Sherrie Levine as a specific challenge to all that you had been doing at
MOMA?
JS: I think that Burgin and Kruger–especially Kruger–have
effectively and sometimes imaginatively adopted the techniques and
effects of commercial art and directed them toward political ends. The
result does not often seem to me to transcend superior illustration;
that is, the idea seems to have been basically complete before the art
was started. Sherrie Levine is a very different case; we might think of
her contribution as being to the art or science of marketing.
No,
it really never occurred to me that the photographers that we exhibited
constituted some kind of logically coherent or prescriptive program, and
therefore it never occurred to me that the photographers that we did
not show constituted an alternative coherent, prescriptive program. The
first exhibition that I did at the museum was called “Five Unrelated
Photographers,” the point being that they represented no position except
their own individual positions. If you review our complete exhibition
program during the years when I was at the museum I think you will agree
that the photographers could not possibly have regarded themselves as
players in some kind of philosophic or esthetic master plan. I suspect,
however, that they regarded the others in the program as interesting
photographers, worthy of their attention.
MD: How important is Roland Barthes’s
Camera Lucida
to you? In some senses, Barthes, in seeking to define the ontology of
photography, parallels concerns within your writings. While his
interests are much more arbitrary and subjective, he does begin to
establish that which is specific to the medium.
JS: I think that I must confess I can’t remember
Camera Lucida
very clearly, and I certainly could not write a satisfactory precis of
it. This is not to say that I did not find it moderately interesting, in
a personal, permissive sort of way, but I’m afraid that I finally
decided that it was less concerned with amplifying the possible meanings
of photographs than with constructing a verbal substitute for them.
MD: Where is the most interesting photography criticism at the moment?
JS:
I suppose that you mean written criticism, but in fact the most useful
criticism in any art is new work done with the same tools. Lincoln
Kirstein was great on Walker Evans’s work, but late in his working life
Edward Weston made a dozen pictures which are perhaps an even better
criticism of it, and an homage as well. Today, Lee Friedlander is
perhaps our best critic of Atget, and in fact of much else in the
tradition that is worth serious thought.
As difficult as it is, we
should perhaps abandon the words simple and direct, at least for a
generation or so. Perhaps stop talking about style altogether, and try
to understand the content of a photographer’s work. This change of view
will at least produce new (and therefore more interesting) mistakes.
John Szarkowski
was director of the department of photography at the Museum of Modern
Art, New York, from 1962 to 1991 (succeeding Edward Steichen). During
his tenure he mounted major exhibitions of such important artists as
Walker Evans, Edward Weston, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Diane
Arbus, William Klein and William Eggleston. He is also a practicing
photographer himself, and a traveling show of his work from both before
and after his years at MOMA may currently be seen at that institution
through May 15, 2006.
Mark Durden is the program
leader in photography at the University of Derby, England. He is also
part of the artist’s group Common Culture and has written extensively on
contemporary art and photography.
(© Mark Durden, 2006. All rights reserved. All images © copyright the photographer and/or publisher)
