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John SzarkowskiThe great hidden influence on photography.

By Jim Lewis
Posted Tuesday, July 10, 2007, at 3:32 PM ET
John Szarkowski. Click image to expand.

It's an open question, and an interesting one, who makes famous artists famous. Who decided that Michelangelo was more important than his contemporary Bandinelli; and when, and according to what criteria? And who decides among our contemporaries? How has the sculptor Richard Serra, to take one example, achieved the kind of renown he now enjoys, and why has the painter Robert Motherwell, to take another, experienced such a precipitous drop in reputation? Among the interests converging on contemporary art, there are collectors, critics, editors, and historians, curators, dealers, auction houses, and consultants, not to mention the general museum-going public. My own experience is that none of them matter very much. Artists' reputations are primarily determined by other artists: Painters decide who belongs in painting's canon, just as poets write poetry's history, and an homage to one director by another is worth a dozen Academy Awards. The rest of us are just tagging along.

There are exceptions, of course—tastemakers of uncommon power. Still, even they tend to be amateurs or semi-pros at the art they're evaluating: Giorgio Vasari, for example, or John Ruskin. And then there was John Szarkowski, who died last Saturday at the age of 81 and who probably had as much sway over the history of photography as anyone ever did. In recent years, anyway, Susan Sontag was photography's most famous critic, and Sam Wagstaff was the greatest collector, but Szarkowski was the curator of record, and from his post at the Museum of Modern Art, where he reigned over the Department of Photography from 1962 to 1991, he oversaw—and to some extent engineered—a revolution in the medium. It is no accident that he was himself a photographer of some talent—though not, crucially, too much. He won two Guggenheims for his own photography before he began his curatorial career, but his work was never quite as accomplished as the work he loved. In fact, he was just what one wants from a man in his position: a practitioner just good enough to know who was great.

The list of artists Szarkowski found, encouraged, and promoted to prominence reads like a roll call of postwar photography: Diane Arbus, Gary Winogrand, William Eggleston. The list of artists he championed and sustained helped define the medium's history: Walker Evans, for example, and Ansel Adams, and Eugene Atget. For a few decades there, Szarkowski had the field almost entirely to himself: There were few collectors of photographs and few galleries that showed them. Most museums were still figuring out what to do with them, and in any case MoMA was, in those days if perhaps no longer, more powerful, by an order of magnitude, than any other force in contemporary art. Szarkowski had been chosen by Edward Steichen to take over the department, and, partly through the strength of his convictions (he was, if the interviews he left behind are a fair indication, at once prickly and profoundly confident) and partly through the power of the institution behind him, he wielded a degree of influence that, I would venture to surmise, no individual has ever had over any single art. The result could easily have been much, much worse than it was.

Indeed, Szarkowski had extraordinarily good taste (by which I suppose I mean that his taste was quite similar to my own). To be sure, his interests were fantastically broad; in his 29 years at the museum, he oversaw some 160 shows. But he's best known for a few principles and a few styles. To begin with, his aesthetic was—Atget notwithstanding—deeply bound up in America, as an idea, a landscape, a streetscape, and an image. He was one of the first to find and show what became the defining style of the '60s: an approach to picture-taking that was more spontaneous, more contingent, lighter of touch than the somewhat ponderous style that preceded it—the kind of photos first produced by Robert Frank (though, in an inexplicable lapse, Szarkowski never mounted a show of Frank's work). He was keenly aware of the degree to which photographic styles change as the result of mechanical or technical innovations: halftone printing, high-speed film, less cumbersome cameras. Then again, he was, by reputation anyway, something of a formalist, and though the term is certainly vague, it suggests an attention to the ways the elements in photographs are structured, rather than their subject matter—though I suspect he would argue, and quite rightly, that there's really no way to separate the two. Perhaps he put the matter best in an interview: "Photographs," he said, "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."

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Jim Lewis is the author of three novels, most recently, The King Is Dead.
Self-portrait of photographer John Szarkowski © Corbis.
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Remarks from the Fray:

John Szarkowski recognized photography as an art form before it was accepted as such by many in academia. He used his incredible influence, and amazing understanding of the medium, to seek out and display photographic works of art.

For that we are all grateful, but unlike a critic, he enhanced a photographers reputation, and made the simple medium a legendary legacy. Once you were in MOMA you had achieved a status unequaled by any prize or contest, you literally became a part of the History of the medium.

He was more than just an art curator, as he followed much more than art photography. Fashion of Avedon, cigarette butts by Penn, and Ansel Adams were all a part of Art photography in Szarkowski's mind, for that broad scope and insight we owe him a huge debt of gratitude.

Gods speed to a legend.

--rushlimpaw

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