Word: szarkowski
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...symbol of old age; it is just wood, under light, put through a lens, chemically fixed. But the action of seeing it aright gathers so much meaning that Atget's photography can reasonably be called a moral act. As MOMA'S curator of photography, John Szarkowski, remarks in his admirable catalogue essay, "Atget's implicit confidence in the continuity and authority of culture was almost old-fashioned even in the time of his youth." But his peculiar and marvelous achievement was to have transferred that belief in continuity to the act of photographing, and to have shown...
...contents-55 images of American nature, ranging in time from the 1860s to the 1970s, and in place from the redwood forests of California to the roadside strip of Rochester, N.Y.-are all drawn from the museum's own collection and put together by its curator, John Szarkowski. But its subject is a crucially important one in American visual culture. When the photograph was young, in the 1840s and '50s, most cultivated Americans were apt to imagine the interior of their continent as a vast wilderness, formless, raw and antipathetic to man. By the 1860s...
...expressive did not really surface until the frontier was gone, by the turn of the century. Its bearers were among the pioneers of photographic modernism-Edward Steichen, Clarence White and Alvin Langdon Coburn, with their "symbolist," tremulous images of tree and field. In these artful and decorous prints, as Szarkowski remarks, "Nature has become ... a part of the known habit and syntax of art, like fruit or flowers arranged on the sideboard." After them, the problem was to recomplicate the game of seeing; to show how the camera could deal with what was neither familiar in landscape nor quite amenable...
...cannot live under a waterfall, though, and Adams' extreme romanticism has prevented him from having many imitators today. The eye behind the lens has become more ironic, farther from Eden, more likely (as Szarkowski puts it) to see "the funny campers with their space-age hiking shoes and backpacks." There is no lack of photographers to approach landscape with intense feeling, but the feelings are not of the same kind. What happened to the old sublimities? Lost with those who believed in them: such, at least, is the message conveyed by Robert Adams' From Lookout Mountain, Smog...
...MOMA's Szarkowski, the reasons run deeper: "Ansel likes to look simpler than he is. He prints differently because he's a different man. In some contexts he'll admit that printing isn't ultimately a technical problem. But when you say that the changes in his prints imply changes in him, he denies it. He's a more interesting artist than he knows...