Alessandra Sanguinetti Some Say Ice MACK/Magnum Photo A girl plays the piano convincingly. Another different girl, spotlit, plays a different piano, slightly less convincingly. Steam rises from a river, possibly black, convincingly. A buffalo mourns Its condition confined between fences during a winter snowstorm, most convincingly. A man’s hands clean a six-shooter pistol, and I […]
“The Transparencies book published by MACK is also significant in its design, the essay within and sequence of the work, which is chapterized by annual progressions through the 70’s American dream in banal (good word, word of goodness) detail” It is not often that a re-examination of the periphery of a significant […]
“Garry Winogrand is, in my view, the central photographer of his generation.” – John Szarkowski (All rights reserved. MoMA @ 1988)
“I think Michael felt the need to discuss the meaning and importance of American photography with a younger generation in Germany who had no experience with these kinds of elderly figures. The National Socialists had either killed or persecuted them in Germany, so for my generation there was no elderly generation in photography.”
“The idea of art and politics co-existing is no more or less deeply problematic than the idea of them being separate. But nobody said it was going to be a picnic.”
‘linoleum buckles on counter tops, and unseasoned lumber twists walls out of plumb before the first occupants arrive.’
“These photographs are clearly fixed facts of the real world impartially recorded by the camera, but they are something more as well.”
Eggleston brought MoMA around eight carousels of slides made around 1970 from which Szarkowski chose seventy-five for the exhibition and, of those, forty-eight for publication in the Guide.
I saw it I suppose very shortly after it was published, when I was still working as a photographer myself, and it was, frankly, shocking. I sensed the power in it, and the authority about it but there was much about it that I didn’t like… The Americans was received with mixed critical reaction. Not […]
By John Szarkowski, originally published in Dot Zero, Spring 1967 The basic effect of modern mass media on photography has been to erode the creative independence and the accountability of the photographer who has worked for them. This is not a value judgement (except from the point of view of the photographer) but rather […]
Friedlander’s work provides some of the first and best examples of what has become a widespread approach to photography. It was part of the general reorientation of the sixties within American art. Within photography his work violated the dominant formal canons not by inattention but by systemic negation. By Martha Rosler, excerpt from […]
She was not a theorist but an artist. Her concern was not to buttress philosophical questions but to make pictures. By John Szarkowski, Director, Department of Photography, NY MoMA Diane Arbus’s pictures challenge the basic assumptions on which most documentary photography has been thought to rest, for they deal with private rather than social […]