A picture has been said to be something between a thing and a thought.
—Samuel Palmer

Of the many things to be noted about the book and the exhibition that John Szarkowski has produced for the Museum of Modern Art under the title Photography Until Now, the first is this: the book is without doubt one of the best ever written on its subject, which is the history of photography, and the exhibition is one of the most beautiful that the museum has devoted to the medium.¹ Neither is without significant flaws, to be sure, but given the scale of Mr. Szarkowski’s project—which encompasses the prehistory of photographic thought, going back to Leonardo, as well as a century and a half of actual photographic production—such flaws as it has are not, for the most part, unduly disfiguring.

At least this is true as far as the historical material is concerned.

At least this is true as far as the historical material is concerned. When it comes to the contemporary pictures, however, the exhibition goes into something of a nose dive. While certain reasons for this conspicuous drop in aesthetic quality can be adduced from the way Mr. Szarkowski treats this period in his book—he speaks, for example, of a sense of “a diminished role for photography, even a kind of disenfranchisement”—what it comes down to, I think, is the same pattern of decline that has lately been discernible elsewhere in the visual arts.