“John Szarkowski: Photographs”
at the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art.
February-May 15, 2005

Attack, heightened nerves, a quivering alertness to patterns of relatedness, a tasteless (or taste-free) acquisitiveness … these are what I like and value most in modern American photography. Image-makers like Walker Evans and Edward Weston were artists with a sliver of ice in their hearts, but their images are fat with feeling, in part because they were impatient with cultivated delay and selectivity. They had a big appetite for visual information, and we see that drivenness in the tremendously poised immediacy of their language. The same appetite and drive race through the work of jumpier, more eruptive photographers like Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, both unstoppable archivists of accident and happenstance. In such work discrimination seems beside the point.

The curator largely responsible for establishing these people as canonical presences is John Szarkowski, who during his 1962–1991 tenure as the director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (succeeding Edward Steichen) mounted important exhibitions of them and other important figures like Diane Arbus, William Klein, and William Eggleston. His curatorial taste and judgment helped to craft one official version of modern photographic history much the same way as MOMA’s first Director, Alfred H. Barr, shaped the way many came to view the course of twentieth-century painting. But before Szarkowski took the job, he took pictures, and he started out as much more than just an