Word: szarkowski
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...Light (New York Graphic Society; $75), will be published next week. The publication is timed to coincide with "Ansel Adams and the West," a two-month retrospective of 153 of his landscape photographs, organized by the Museum of Modern Art's director of the department of photography, John Szarkowski, and opening at MOMA next week. In workshop sessions over the years, Adams has personally taught at least 4,500 students. Original prints of his photos may number as high as 30,000. The most sought-after of these images, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (1941), exists in an edition of about...
...Adams' photography as it is to O'Keeffe's painting, or further back to the landscapes of Yosemite and Yellowstone painted by Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran and their followers in the 19th century. An entire tradition of seeing is inherent in the word wilderness; it is essentially romantic. As Szarkowski has observed, "Adams' pictures are perhaps anachronisms. They are perhaps the last confident and deeply felt pictures of their tradition . . . It does not seem likely that a photographer of the future will be able to bring to the heroic wild landscape the passion, trust and belief that Adams has brought...
...made to distinguish two ideas of what a photograph is: either "a mirror, reflecting a portrait of the artist who made it...or a window, through which one might better know the world." (This from the show's catalogue essay, written by the museum's director of photography, John Szarkowski). In reviewing "Mirrors and Windows" for The New Republic, John Canaday wrote a reactionary two-part article entitled "Polluted Birthright." "The pollutant I am referring to," Canaday explained, "is the presence of the photographer in the pictures he takes, his intrusion of personal judgements and responses into the only pictorial...
...language of photography rather than the pattern of events tended to become the essential subject for many photographers. The retreat from public posture also combined with personal fantasy, reverie and wit. The result has been a rather low-pressure art that refuses to strum on the heartstrings. For convenience, Szarkowski divides the images in this show into "mirrors"?pictures that mean to describe the photographer's own sensibility?and "windows"?realist photos of fact, including the facts of photography seen as a system. In short, the romantic vs. the realist: but it is not a very strict dichotomy...
...Szarkowski's show is not the last word on the state of American photography; in deed, some of his choices, no less than his uncompromisingly aesthetic position, will be a subject of harsh debate. But it deserves to be seen and seen again, for its emphasis on the apolitical, the uneventful, the odd, the dumb and the chancy is now a kind of official view with which photography itself must reckon...