Monday, July 09, 2007

John Szarkowski Dies at 81


One of the most influential people in all the world of photography, John Szarkowski will be missed. He was one of the people that I loved to read about. He had the most creative and unusual shows, and they helped define photography as an art form. He was controversial as well, and that just made him even more enigmatic.

In the early 1960’s, when Mr. Szarkowski (pronounced Shar-COW-ski) began his curatorial career, photography was commonly perceived as a utilitarian medium, a means to document the world. Perhaps more than anyone, Mr. Szarkowski changed that perception. For him, the photograph was a form of expression as potent and meaningful as any work of art, and as director of photography at the Modern for almost three decades, beginning in 1962, he was perhaps its most impassioned advocate. Two of his books, “The Photographer’s Eye,” (1964) and “Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures From the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art” (1973), remain syllabus staples in art history programs.

Mr. Szarkowski was first to confer importance on the work of Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand in his influential exhibition “New Documents” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967. That show, considered radical at the time, identified a new direction in photography: pictures that seemed to have a casual, snapshot-like look and subject matter so apparently ordinary that it was hard to categorize.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I was acepted to MOMA in photography collection in 1982 at the time Mrs. Szarkowsky was the Curator, and at the time I was a young photographer arriving from Portugal to have my first photography exibition in New York, and for me it was very importante to have a special person like him, very “Human ” giving the right value to the Human figure and to the Nature things, to be acepted to the permanent collection it was like a voice telling me “go ahead”, yersteday I was at the phone to New York with my good friend Ani Rivera, and when he gave me the terrible new about Mrs. Szarkowsky , I told him, when this kind of persons died we die a little too, because they are very important influences in our space and time in this World, but this kind of people never die, their work last for ever. And the portrait above, taken by Avedon shows us the Jon Sarkowski in the real sense and meaning of what should be a real portrait he is there in Space and Time for ever…
Thanks Mrs. John Szarkowsky.