John Szarkowski 1925-2007

John Szarkowski, the influential director of the Museum of Modern Art's photography department for nearly 30 years and a champion of the medium's potential as art, died July 7 of complications from a stroke he had suffered in February. He was 81 and lived in East Chatham, N.Y.

Szarkowski directed MOMA's photography program from 1962 to 1991, a period of transition in both the public's and the art world's relationship to photographs. In the early '60s, Life and other picture magazines represented the popular idea of photography's esthetic possibilities, while photographers seeking to be considered artists, such as Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind and Minor White, worked largely in isolation. By the '90s, picture magazines were historical artifacts, and photographs had achieved favored-medium status in galleries and museums.

Szarkowski had a crucial role in this development of photography from art orphan to star player, although in the later years of his tenure he became a conservative voice in the field. He discovered and vigorously promoted Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, the protagonists of his "New Documents" exhibition of 1967, but he would have little to do with the "photo-based art" of the 1970s and '80s. Postmodernism left him cold; MOMA belatedly acquired Cindy Sherman's '70s "Untitled Film Stills" only in 1995, after he had retired.

When Szarkowski arrived at MOMA, the photography department was already well known. Its first director, Beaumont Newhall, is considered the father of photography's status as an art, having written the authoritative English-language text on the subject in the 1930s. After World War II Newhall was replaced by Edward Steichen, a curatorial impresario who launched sprawling shows like "The Family of Man" MOMA's 1955 blockbuster that presented photography as a universal language of human experience, from birth to death. Steichen also organized inclusive group shows of contemporary work, relying on themes like abstraction.

Szarkowski turned his back on the more or less mighty themes of Steichen and to an extent on the art-historical lineage established by Newhall. His first show, in 1963, was titled "Five Unrelated Photographers" but his first position paper was the catalogue for the 1964 exhibition "The Photographer's Eye." In it he argued that the medium's fundamental formal characteristics--detail, point of view, time, etc.--constituted its artistic potential. In spirit not far removed from the formalist esthetic applied to painting by critic Clement Greenberg, Szarkowski's approach enabled him to view vernacular, commercial and art photographs as partners in a progressive development of the medium.

One result was a preference for contemporary photographers, like William Eggleston, whose work mined the territory of the snapshot ("William Eggleston's Guide" 1976); another was in exhibitions like "From the Picture Press" (1973), which consisted of images culled largely from the archive of the New York Daily News. Perhaps his most illustrious curatorial achievement was a four-part exhibition of the work of Eugene Atget, which appeared in installments from 198 I to 1985. Atget was a journeyman commercial photographer in turn-of-the-century Paris, but Szarkowski portrayed him as a poet of the camera fueled by a Proustian sensibility.

As important as his exhibitions may have been, though, one could say that Szarkowski made his deepest contributions as a writer. His arguments for the importance of his discoveries, or his reconsiderations of acknowledged masters such as Henri Cartier-Bresson or Walker Evans, were always beautifully phrased and usually bold in conception. Before Rosalind Krauss, Susan Sontag, Janet Malcolm and others "outside" the tight-knit photography community began addressing photography seriously in the 1970s, he was one of the few to demonstrate that photographs were worthy of intellectual discussion.

In this sense his most memorable achievement may have been the 1973 book Looking at Photographs, which consisted of 100 reproductions of photographs in MOMA's collection and a single-page meditation by Szarkowski about each image. Radical in their breadth and depth then, these small essays continue to hold their power. Consider this excerpt, from his piece about a 19th-century survey image by Timothy O'Sullivan:

His landscapes are as precisely and as economically composed as a good masonry wall. It is as though every square inch of the precious glass plate, carried so far at so great an effort, had to be justified completely.

After retiring from the museum in 199 I, Szarkowski returned to what he had been doing before he became a curator: photographing. He concentrated on rural subjects near his upstate home, such as his apple orchard and a neighbor's antique barn. Selections of these pictures were shown at Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, in 2006,and in a traveling retrospective of his work organized by San Francisco MOMA in 2005.

COPYRIGHT 2007 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning