John Szarkowsi, who until his retirement, was the director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was instrumental in making the world recognize photography as art. Szarkowski had a great case for being considered the most important force in modern American photography, the curator who insisted that photography was a contemporary art form as serious and demanding as painting, and who single-handedly took colour photography from the advertising pages of glossy magazines into the galleries.
In 1962, Szarkowski took over from the esteemed Edward Steichen as the curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He remained there for three decades. In 1967, he curated the New Documents show that featured the work of street photographers like Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander alongside Diane Arbus's arresting, and often shocking, portraits. Both Winogrand and Friedlander were arbiters of a new aesthetic in photography, their seemingly casual images of crowded streets, everyday scenes and ordinary people a direct contrast to the meaningfulness of 'serious' reportage. Szarkowski was the first critic and curator to identify, and to recognise the importance of, this new and radical aesthetic, which was resolutely downbeat but oddly illuminating. The New Documents show was controversial and caused consternation among conservative critics. It was nothing, though, compared to the chorus of outraged disapproval that greeted William Eggleston's Guide, which Szarkowski curated in 1976. "Mr. Szarkowski throws all caution to the winds and speaks of Mr Eggleston's pictures as perfect", sneered Hilton Kramer in the New York Times. "Perfect? Perfectly banal, perhaps. Perfectly boring, certainly." Today, Eggleston is perhaps the most influential American photographer of the last 30 years, his colour-saturated images of the surreal banality of the American south oft-copied but never equaled in their strangeness. "It demonstrated to a lot of young photographers not only that you could photograph in colour," Szarkowski later remarked of the accompanying book, William Eggleston's Guide, "but you could photograph the humble vernacular of your own life."
That, more or less, is where we live now in terms of contemporary photography, though the age of digital manipulation is upon us and the photograph is no longer simply a record of a transient or decisive moment, but something altogether more slippery and indefinable. Perhaps even duplicitous.
Anyone remotely interested in the trajectory of modern photography from Walker Evans onwards should certainly try to find Szarkowski's seminal book, The Photographer's Eye (1964), as well as his equally incisive study, Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art (1973).
"One might compare the art of photography to the act of pointing," he once wrote, mischievously, adding, "It must be true that some of us point to more interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations than others." He pointed to the future too, unerringly, and with a confidence born of great critical intelligence, instinct and an eye for the humble vernacular of everyday life.
