John Szarkowski emerged from his office leaning on a yardstick. At 64, he walks perfectly well unaided, but the stick was a dandyish touch and, besides, as director of the New York Museum of Modern Art`s photography department, he had just had an exhausting week.
The night before, more than 2,000 people attended the opening of
”Photography Until Now,” Szarkowski`s survey exhibition that belatedly celebrates the sesquicentennial of the medium. It is not only the last of the observances in a major museum, it also is one of the smallest and, without question, the most personal.
Where other shows used as many as 400 images to cover photographic history, Szarkowski does it with 271. And where other organizers provided a catalog supplementing the exhibition, Szarkowski gives a fresh historical account that determines how the show unfolds and at what pace.
Of course, little of this is a surprise. In the 28 years Szarkowski has directed MOMA`s photography department, he continually has gone his own way, creating exhibitions and books that set themselves apart by the brilliance of their vision. No one involved with photography in an American museum comes close to him, and the only real surprise is that a Szarkowski history has not appeared sooner.
”I`ve always been intellectually disatisfied with the existing histories,” Szarkowski said, ”because they make you consider one issue at a time as though they`re all discrete, living in their own little cubbyholes. People talk about `documentary photography` and `artistic photography.` Well, what photograph is not a document? And what, in the name of God, is `artistic photography?` It sounds awful. It`s like `artistic writing.` Can you imagine anything so wretched as `artistic writing`? Edgar Guest, right?
”Then theories get woven around these categories that make no sense at all if you leave the category. It`s like having a theory of the evolution of humankind that works perfectly as long as it`s applied only to Irishmen. And that`s not very satisfactory.
”On the other hand, if you use the standard art-historical technology-so-and-so went to Dusseldorf and enrolled in this school where he studied with masters A, B and C and later made a trip to Essen where he saw an altarpiece by X-it doesn`t work either. The art-historical approach cannot deal with all situations. So you have to do it some other way.”
The way he chose was based on technique. Believing every photographer eventually has to face up to it, Szarkowski found technique a useful organizing principle. He proceeded by questioning what happened when the wet plate method of producing images replaced the daguerreotype and so on. In each case, he determined how changes in technique affected the pictures and their audience.
This gave the book seven linked chapters, which Szarkowski modified for use in the exhibition. A brief introduction at the entrance traces the history of optics before photography. Then come rooms devoted to ”The Daguerreotype and the Calotype”; ”The Wet Plate”; ”The Dry Plate”; ”Photographs in Ink”; and ”After the Magazines.”
”I`m very much interested in books,” Szarkowski said, ”and, in some sense, I might have thought (the exhibition was an excuse for the book) when I started. But now you look at the show and realize you just can`t achieve that in a book. The physical richness and beauty of the show is more important to the meaning of it than I think any show I`ve ever done.”
Partly in recognition of that richness, Szarkowski kept the exhibition small. His target was 250 images, but the number grew to 271, all mounted chronologically by idea in galleries including pieces of photographic equipment on the museum`s first floor.
”One gets depressed at seeing people`s eyes glaze when they`re two-thirds of the way through an exhibition,” Szarkowski said. ”I think a person of good intention and maybe a little preparation should be able to get through a show on one trip. That doesn`t mean they exhaust it. But they should be able to get to the end of it without being basket cases. I look at pictures all the time, I exercise that muscle and think that, if you pay attention, 250 pictures is a day`s work.
”The only way it was possible to do the show with a small number was to pay no attention to photographers` names. I did not try to represent photographers. If I had tried, I would have had to take out all the anonymous pictures, about 40, and that`s a lot. Plus I would have had to take out people whose names we knew, but that was all we knew, people who were strangers to us in everything else.
”History books are filled with terrific photographers who aren`t in the show. William Henry Jackson isn`t in. Alexander Gardner isn`t. Bob Capa isn`t. Neither is Lisette Model. You could make a long list of only the dead ones, not to raise the question of people who aren`t in and aren`t even dead yet. But that`s not the question. I`m not trying to get people elected to some Senate of Great Photographers. I`m doing a more serious kind of work.”
Szarkowski long has worked to show how photography`s seeming quirks and oddities, such as Edward H. Mitchell`s ”A Carload of Red Apples” or Liberty Hyde Bailey`s ”Cucumber Pollination Experiments,” are to a large degree what the medium is about. Here he presents a convincing argument, with scientific studies, amateur collages, anonymous newspaper and tax-record photographs.
By contrast, many of the practitioners of so-called art photography-Frederi ck Evans, Charles Sheeler, Paul Strand, Ansel Adams-are represented by but one (often unfamiliar) image from early in their careers, and only a few of the giants-Man Ray, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston-get more generous treatment.
Then, too, Szarkowski`s groupings of images might be illuminating but unexpected, as in the case of portraits by Stieglitz, Josef Albers and Weston sharing a wall with two of Eugene Atget`s Saint-Cloud landscapes. The installation extends Stieglitz`s definition of a portrait-a composite of all images of a subject-to each of the others.
The concluding section of the show will be the most controversial, though not because Szarkowski advances a ”new” mode of picture-making for the `90s. Unlike many observers of the current scene, he has largely refused to embrace the conceptually oriented work of contemporary artists. The final images-by Chris Killip, Joan Fontcuberta, Nicholas Nixon, Frank Gohlke and Judith Joy Ross-are all black-and-white silver prints that easily fit into older traditions.
”Ross lives in Bethlehem, Pa., and has a small commission to do pictures of parks or recreational facilities,” Szarkowski said. ”The image here is one of them. They`re mostly portraits, but not always. It`s probably provocative to end with such an old-fashioned picture. Although, is it really an old-fashioned picture? Or is it just old-fashioned in its rough formal terms? Maybe it is not an old-fashioned picture. Maybe it is something else.” Szarkowski did not say what, but he ends his book with a quotation from Eudora Welty that gives a vision of the photographer`s continuing role: ”He sets forth what makes up our ordinary world. What is there, however strange, can be accepted without question; familiarity will be what overwhelms us.”
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”Photography Until Now” continues at New York`s Museum of Modern Art through May 29. Thereafter, it will travel to the Cleveland Museum of Art
(June 27-Aug. 19).
