Szarkowski Wrap Up.
Tuscany Teaser. Copyright.
Just a few words to wrap up the section on John Szarkowski.
Szarkowski is a former Director of Photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Apart from being a celebrated manager at MOMA he also was a keen photographer and scholar. He has written two books on photography: The Photographer’s Eye and Looking at Pictures. I happen to own a copy of each.
You get to look at pictures. One at the time. You get to better understand the visual language of photography. You get to read Szarkowski’s eye opening comments to many of the pictures.
I can only say this: Both books are great reads. Their content goes beyond photography, and Szarkowski’s keen sense of images and text makes them pure joy. They are books about communication.
You may start here:
Good luck with Szarkowski.
Szarkowski: The Thing Itself.
The Thing Itself. Copyright 2009: Knut Skjærven.
“More convincingly than any other kind of picture, a photograph evokes the tangible presence of reality. Its most fundamental use and its broadest acceptance has been as a substitute for the subject itself – a simpler, more permanent, more clearly version of the plain fact.
Our faith in the truth of a photograph rests on our belief that the lens is impartial, and will draw the subject as it is, neither nobler nor meaner. This faith may be naive and illusory (for though the lens draws the subject, the photographer defines it), but is persists. The photographer’s vision convinces us to the degree that the photographer hides his hand.”
This is a barebones pitstop post. For more pitstop posts, please go to pitstop puzzle.
Other posts on Szarkowski: Introduction, The Thing Itself, The Detail, The Frame, Time, Vantage Point.
Szarkowski: Vantage Point.
Vantage Point. Copyright 2009 Knut Skjærven.
“If the photographer could not move his subject, he could move his camera. To see the subject clearly – often to see it at all – he had to abandon a normal vantage point, and shoot his picture from above, or below, or from too close, or too far away, or from the back side, inverting the order of things’ importance, or with the nominal subject of his picture half hidden.
From his photographs, he learned that the appearance of the world was richer and less simple than his mind would have guessed.
He discovered that his pictures could reveal not only the clarity but the obscurity of things, and the these mysterious and evasive images could also, in their own terms, seem ordered and meaningful”.
John Szarkowski: The Photographers Eye, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 2009.
This is a barebones pitstop post. For more pitstop posts, please go to pitstop puzzle.
Other posts on Szarkowski: Introduction, The Thing Itself, The Detail, The Frame, Time, Vantage Point.
Szarkowski: The Detail.
Lady in Red. Copyright 2007: Knut Skjærven.
“Once he left the studio, it was impossible for the photographer to copy the painters’ schemata. He could not stage-manage the battle, like Uccello or Velásquez, bringing together elements which had been separate in space and time, nor could he rearrange the parts of his picture to construct a design that pleased him better.
From the reality before him he could only choose that part that seemed relevant and consistent, and what would fill his plate. If he could not show the battle, explain its purpose and its strategy, or distinguish its heroes from its villains, he could show what was too ordinary to paint: the empty road scattered with cannon balls, the mud encrusted on the caisson’s wheels, the anonymous faces, the single broken figure by the wall.
Intuitively, he sought and found the significant detail. His work, incapable of narrative, turned toward symbol.”
John Szarkowski: The Photographers Eye, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 2009.
This is a barebones pitstop post. For more pitstop posts, please go to pitstop puzzle.
Other posts on Szarkowski: Introduction, The Thing Itself, The Detail, The Frame, Time, Vantage Point.
Szarkowski: Time.
Oprah Winfrey in Copenhagen. Copyright 2010: Knut Skjærven.
“Photographs stand in special relation to time, for they describe only the present.
Exposures were long in early photography. If the subjects moved, its multiple image described also a space-time dimension. Perhaps it was such accidents that suggested the photographic study of the process of movement, and later, of the virtual forms produced by the continuity of movement in time.
Photographers found an inexhaustible subject in the isolation of a single segment of time. They photographed the horse in midstride, the fugitive expressions of the human face, the gestures of the hand and body, the bat meeting the ball, the milk drop splashing in the saucer of milk.
More subtle was the discovery of that segment of time that Cartier-Bresson called the decisive moment: decisive not because of the exterior event (the bat meeting the ball) but because in that moment the flux of changing forms and patterns was sensed to have achieved balance and clarity and order – because the image became, for an instant, a picture.”
John Szarkowski: The Photographers Eye, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 2009.
This is a barebones pitstop post. For more pitstop posts, please go to pitstop puzzle.
Other posts on Szarkowski: Introduction, The Thing Itself, The Detail, The Frame, Time, Vantage Point.
Szarkowski: The Frame.
Nice Nostalgia. Copyright. Knut Skjærven.
“Since the photographer’s picture was not conceived but selected, his subject was never truly discrete, never wholly self-contained. The edges of his film demarcated what he thought most important, but the subject he had shot was something else; is has extended in four directions. If the photographer’s frame surrounded two figures, isolating them from the crowd in which they stood, it created a relationship between the two figures that had not existed before.
The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge – the line that separates in from out – and on the shapes that are created by it.”
John Szarkowski: The Photographers Eye, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 2009.
This is a barebones pitstop post. For more pitstop posts, please go to pitstop puzzle.
Other posts on Szarkowski: Introduction, The Thing Itself, The Detail, The Frame, Time, Vantage Point.
Szarkowski: Introduction.
The Thing Itself. Copyright 2007: Knut Skjærven.
“The first thing a photographer learned was that photography dealt with the actual; he had not only to accept this fact, but to treasure it: unless he did, photography would defeat him. He learned that the world itself is an artist of incomparable inventiveness, and to recognize its best works and moments, to anticipate them, to clarify them and make them permanent, requires intelligence both acute and supply.
But he learned also that the factuality of his pictures, no matter how convincing and unarguable, was a different thing than the reality itself. Much of the reality was filtered out in the static little black and white image, and some of it was exhibited with an unnatural clarity, an exaggerated importance. The subject and the picture was not the same thing, although they would afterwards seem so. It was the photographer’s problem to see not simply the reality before him but the still invisible picture, and to make his choices in terms of the latter.”
John Szarkowski: The Photographers Eye, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 2009.
This is a barebones pitstop post. For more pitstop posts, please go to pitstop puzzle.
Other posts on Szarkowski: Introduction, The Thing Itself, The Detail, The Frame, Time, Vantage Point.
barebones’ Venn diagram
Picturing The Communication Process
Recent Comments
JUANITO LOYOLA PERAN… on Phenomenological Method: 2. In… irene on Denotation and Connotatio… achergui on Lady in Red Knut Skjaerven on Barthes on Studium and Punctum… JP on Gestalt Factor: Similarit… -
