A framework for studying photographs

With a small IPhone in everyone’s pocket, images today have become more and more ubiquitous. We are surrounded by them and I occasionally wonder how we process so many of them. Although we are surrounded by a quick selfie or a shot of what we ate for breakfast, I still believe in the power of a thoughtful image. John Szarkowski set up a framework for looking at and evaluating photographs. He was a photographer, curator, writer, teacher and critic who did as much as anyone in the 20th century to establish photography as a fine art — and photographers everywhere ought to thank him for that. He died in 2007, but I try to bear his influence in mind as I walk through galleries and look at photographs on walls. Edward Steichen and others had worked for the same goal before him, but Szarkowski had more success than they — and that success was slow in coming.

One of his books, The Photographer’s Eye, was based on a 1964 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. It included works from Atget, Henri Cartier Bresson, Walker Evans, Sander, Paul Strand, Edward Weston and others. Mostly anyone who defined the art up until then. Before Szarkowski’s time, photography’s perception in the fine art world was at best, a struggle — and many critics dismissed it as a documentary occupation: recording events as they occurred and detailing what needed to change. Szarkowski changed that assumption, pushing photography as an observer of the present without necessarily changing anything.He divided the exhibit up into five groups: the thing itself, the detail, the frame, time and vantage point. These were five elements that photographers everywhere had to contend with. Those who did so successfully created art. Those who could not manage these elements failed.

The thing forced photographers to choose what he called “the actual.” Time was something that changed as the films, the technology of the time, grew faster and faster. The frame allowed photographers to choose what to include and exclude. Details allowed photographers to stress some acts over others. Vantage point allowed photographers to tell an unexpected story based on an unexpected starting point.

With this perspective, he helped bring photographers like Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus to the scene. His exhibit of Bill Brandt also changed his perception back in the United Kingdom.