Szarkowski Quotes

There is a terrible truthfulness about photography. The ordinary academician gets hold of a pretty model, paints her as well as he can, calls her Juliet, and puts a nice verse Shakespeare underneath, and the picture is admired beyond measure. The photographer finds the same pretty girl, he dresses her up and photographs her, and calls her Juliet, but somehow it is no good – it is still Miss Wilkins, the model. It is too true to be Juliet. George Bernard Shaw Wilson’s Photographic Magazine, LVI, 1909

John Szarkowski wrote of fellow photographer Garry Winogrand that his ambition ‘was not to make good pictures, but through photography to know life’.

Speaking of photography Baudelaire said: "This industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy." And in his own terms of reference Baudelaire was half right; certainly the new medium could not satisfy old standards. The photographer must find new ways to make his meaning clear.

And once made objective and permanent, immortalized in a picture, these trivial things took on importance.

But it was not only the way that photography described things that was new; it was also the things it chose to describe.

A positive mental attitude is the key to great photographs. If you go out expecting to see interesting pictures, you tend to be more positive, and then luckier. As the great photographer and curator John Szarkowski said: ‘Luck is the attentive photographer’s best teacher.’ My general outlook is, get up, get out and go and find things. I try to summon an excitement and amazement for life.

The trained artist could draw a head or a hand from a dozen perspectives. The photographer discovered that the gestures of a hand were infinitely various, and that the wall of a building in the sun was never twice the same.

The reason [Ansel Adams] is important to us, as I think he is, is because he was a good artist. On his best days, he was a terrific artist. And he found some way to put together the fragments of the world in a way that transformed them into a picture. In the same way that a poet uses the same dictionaries that the rest of us do—all the words are in there, all the words in the poem are [in the dictionary]. It is just a matter of taking a few of them and putting them in the right order. That’s all there is to it. . . . A good picture does something like that.

Most of this deluge of pictures seemed formless and accidental, but some achieved coherence, even in their strangeness.

Just as nature had once imitated art, so now it began to imitate the picture made by the camera.

But whether produced by art or by luck, each picture was part of a massive assault on our traditional habits of seeing.

All photographs are time exposures, of shorter or longer duration, and each describes a discrete parcel of time.