John Szarkowski
[Curator, critic, historian, and photographer, b. 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, d. 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]
From his photographs [the photographer] 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 these things, and that these mysterious and evasive images could also, in their own terms, seem ordered and meaningful.
Since its earliest days, photography has been practiced by thousands who shared no common tradition or training, who were disciplined and united by no academy or guild, who considered their medium variously as a science, an art, a trade, or an entertainment, and who were often unaware of each other’s work... Some of these pictures were the product of knowledge and skill and sensibility and invention; many were the product of accident, improvisation, misunderstanding, and empirical experiment. But whether produced by art or by luck, each picture was part of a massive assault on our traditional habits of seeing.
The compelling clarity with which a photograph recorded the trivial suggested that… it was in fact
not trivial, but filled with undiscovered meaning.
Ducasse says to his friend Mallarmé—I think this is a true story—he says, “You know, I’ve got a lot of good ideas for poems, but the poems are never very good.” Mallarmé says, “Of course, you don’t make poems out of ideas, you make poems out of words.” Really good, huh? Really true. So, photographers who aren’t so good think that you make photographs out of ideas. And they generally get only about halfway to the photograph and think that they’re done.
[Writers on photography have] difficulty in accepting the fact that luck is a great and powerful force in photography; we tend to be interested only in intention, because it makes the enterprise feel more important.
Painting was difficult, expensive, and precious, and it recorded what was known to be important. Photography was easy, cheap and ubiquitous, and it recorded anything: shop windows and sod houses and family pets and steam engines and unimportant people. And once made objective and permanent, immortalized in a picture, those trivial things took on importance.
A long generation ago photographers still worked under great black focusing cloths, which hid not only their faces but (it seemed) their magic secrets. Old photographers smelled of hypo, and had fingernails black to the cuticle, and were surrounded by an aura of esoteric alchemy.
When pictures have a great deal of information, that information has to have a shape of its own, even a shapeliness.
