{"id":166,"date":"2007-07-11T01:48:00","date_gmt":"2007-07-11T01:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brianrose.com\/blog\/?p=166"},"modified":"2007-07-11T01:48:00","modified_gmt":"2007-07-11T01:48:00","slug":"new-yorkjohn-szarkowski","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.brianrose.com\/blog\/2007\/07\/new-yorkjohn-szarkowski\/","title":{"rendered":"New York\/John Szarkowski"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>
Dean Street, Brooklyn<\/span>

John Szarkowski, photographer and former photo curator of the Museum of Modern Art died a few days ago. Much has been written about his significance in bringing photography fully into its own as a medium deserving the same attention as painting and sculpture. He’s the guy who moved the Modern from Family of Man<\/span> sentimentality to the sharp-eyed ascerbity of Garry Winogrand and William Eggleston. <\/span>Here<\/a> is the beautifully written obituary by Philip Gefter in the New York Times. I love his take down of Hilton Kramer, the art critic hack who used to write for the Times:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMr. Szarkowski throws all caution to the winds and speaks of Mr. Eggleston\u2019s pictures as \u2018perfect,\u2019 \u201d Hilton Kramer wrote in The Times. \u201cPerfect? Perfectly banal, perhaps. Perfectly boring, certainly.\u201d Mr. Eggleston would come to be considered a pioneer of color photography.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Szarkowski was important to me in various ways, but perhaps most importantly for his championing of color photography. When I was a struggling art student down in Baltimore fending off retrograde professors, I began experimenting with shooting color slides. When I saw Eggleston’s Guide<\/span>, the book based on the exhibition at MoMA, it hit me like a ton of bricks, and confirmed the path I had started down. That was 1976. The next year I went to Cooper Union in New York, and began studying with Joel Meyerowitz, whose color street photography I found inspiring.<\/span> <\/p>\n

Once in New York I saw Szarkowski’s fascinating\u2013and controversial\u2013show Mirrors and Windows. A few years later, after completing the first phase of my Iron Curtain project, Szarkowski bought several of my prints for the museum. I met him, briefly. Shook his hand. He said some nice things to me about my work. I never met him again, but have always felt honored to have had my work recognized by this great and influential man.<\/p>\n

<\/span>
Garrick Theatre, 1954, John Szarkowski<\/span> <\/p>\n

He was a fine photographer as well.
<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dean Street, BrooklynJohn Szarkowski, photographer and former photo curator of the Museum of Modern Art died a few days ago. Much has been written about his significance in bringing photography fully into its own as a medium deserving the same attention as painting and sculpture. He’s the guy who moved the Modern from Family of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photogs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brianrose.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brianrose.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brianrose.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brianrose.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brianrose.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.brianrose.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brianrose.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brianrose.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brianrose.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}