Photography's father-figure has gone through the mirror backwards July 19, 2007
On July 7th, in America, the father of modern photography, or at least in America, where photography is big and respected as an art form (they grew up with it – it was invented at the time America was being invented)... he has died.
If you know photography you will probably know the names of people he ‘fathered’ – Szarkowski championed Garry Winogrand (who took pictures of beautiful women in everyday places), Lee Friedlander (who stood behind a lampost or a tree stump to compose), Diane Arbus (who photographed freaks) ... and there were others.
What they had in common – and this should be interesting to those of you not interested – was that these photographers questioned the old social order to expose racism and alienation in mainstream society, and they looked again atwhat was valued in photography. Whether or not they liked the beautiful tones of an Ansel Adams mountain print and an Edward Weston nude (and they probably did) they nevertheless challenged the domination of the sharply focused print. They explored oblique framing, radical cropping and the use of the natural grain of the film, extreme close-ups and subject matter that ranged from the dispossessed to the freakish to the oddly normal in American society.
But it was not only the promotion of a young, radical group of photographers which established Szarkowski’s reputation as a curator and father figure, but his excitement at looking for a folk art, something TRULY American, on the back of the Second World War.
In the years and exhibitions that followed he took pride in placing one of the classic photographer’s photographs next to one plucked from any old collection taken by ‘you’. Provided that the picture was interesting.
“One does not,” he insisted, in an interview in Art in America, choose to write about photographers who illustrate one’s point of view. The process is almost the reverse: one’s point of view is formed by the work one chooses to write about, because it is challenging, mysterious, worthy of study, fun. One does not choose new friends because they exemplify virtues that one most admires; one chooses them because they are interestingly different than the friends one already has.
His belief was that “the basic material of photographs is not intrinsically beautiful. It’s not like ivory or tapestry or bronze or oil on canvas. You’re not supposed to look at the thing, you’re supposed to look through it. It’s a window. And everything behind it has got to be organised as a space full of stuff, even if it’s only air.”
So remember this when you point the camera – when you tilt the mirror – when you angle yourself at the window frame to get a good view. It’s looking at you as much as you are looking through it.
