John Szarkowski
John Szarkowski
Thaddeus John Szarkowski was a photographer, curator, historian, and critic. From 1962 to 1991 Szarkowski was the Director of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art...
John Szarkowski quotes about
photography illumination media
One of the leading uses of photography by the mass media came to be called photojournalism. From the late 'twenties' to the early 'fifties' what might have been the golden age of this speciality - photographers worked largely as the possessors of special and arcane skills, like the ancient priests who practiced and monopolized the skills of pictography or carving or manuscript illumination. In those halcyon days the photographer enjoyed a privileged status.
photography lying discovery
Like an organism, photography was born whole. It is in our progressive discovery of it that its history lies.
convince-us hands vision
The photographer’s vision convinces us to the degree that the photographer hides his hand.
photography attitude taken
The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process - a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made - constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes - but photographs, as the man on the street put, were taken.
photography might vantage-point
Pure photography is a system of picture-making that describes more or less faithfully what might be seen through a rectangular frame from a particular vantage point at a given moment.
photography may vehicle
Whatever else a photograph may be about, it is inevitably about photography, the container and vehicle of all its meanings.
photography ideas interesting
A camera has interesting ideas of its own.
music simple variation
Trained as a musician, [photographer Ansel] Adams understood the richness of variation that could be unfolded from a simple theme.
photography eye cones
Photography is choosing where to point your eye-cone.
photography years done
Most of Tina Modotti's work that is known to the photography world was done in Mexico in the years 1923 through 1926, when she lived and worked with Edward Weston.
photography philosophical thinking
In practice a photographer does not concern himself with philosophical issues while working; he makes photographs, working with subject matter that he thinks will make the pictures.
photography cat thinking
What's happening is that people are making a billion photographs a year of their cats, frequently with the cats wearing costumes. Do you think I should be doing shows of cat photography?
photography facts purpose
Photography's central sense of purpose and aesthetic: the precise and lucid description of significant fact.
photography might facts
Photography was not invented to serve a clearly understood function. There was in fact widespread uncertainty, even among its inventors, as to what it might be good for.