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
geography
He photographed not so much geography as weather.
photography world impossible
Photography is the easiest thing in the world if one is willing to accept pictures that are flaccid, limp, bland, banal, indiscriminately informative, and pointless. But if one insists in a photograph that is both complex and vigorous it is almost impossible
photography lying simplicity
The simplicity of photography lies in the fact that it is very easy to make a picture. The staggering complexity of it lies in the fact that a thousand other pictures of the same subject would have been equally easy.
photography best-picture
The very best pictures adapt themselves to many changes in meaning.
photography writing editing
Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one's cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite.
photography teacher luck
Luck is the attentive photographer's best teacher.
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.
photography eye cones
Photography is choosing where to point your eye-cone.