John Szarkowski
John Szarkowski
Thaddeus John Szarkowski was a photographer, curator, historian, and critic. From 1962 to 1991 Szarkowski was the Director of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art...
photography might vantage-point
Pure photography is a system of picture-making that describes more or less faithfully what might be seen through a rectangular frame from a particular vantage point at a given moment.
photography philosophical thinking
In practice a photographer does not concern himself with philosophical issues while working; he makes photographs, working with subject matter that he thinks will make the pictures.
it-is-what-it-is
It isn't what a picture is of, it is what it is about.
convince-us hands vision
The photographer’s vision convinces us to the degree that the photographer hides his hand.
photography lying discovery
Like an organism, photography was born whole. It is in our progressive discovery of it that its history lies.
photography illumination media
One of the leading uses of photography by the mass media came to be called photojournalism. From the late 'twenties' to the early 'fifties' what might have been the golden age of this speciality - photographers worked largely as the possessors of special and arcane skills, like the ancient priests who practiced and monopolized the skills of pictography or carving or manuscript illumination. In those halcyon days the photographer enjoyed a privileged status.
photography teacher luck
Luck is the attentive photographer's best teacher.
photography attitude taken
The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process - a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made - constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes - but photographs, as the man on the street put, were taken.
done photographer best-work
A photographer's best work is, alas, generally done for himself.
photography best-picture
The very best pictures adapt themselves to many changes in meaning.
world bricks different
The world now contains more photographs than bricks, and they are, astonishingly, all different.
photography writing editing
Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one's cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite.
photography sometimes existence
They were ... pure and unadulterated photographs, and sometimes they hinted at the existence of visual truths that had escaped all other systems of detection.
goal persuasive impeccable
The goal is not to make something factually impeccable, but seamlessly persuasive.