Appreciation, John Szarkowski

John Szarkowski died Saturday, and the Los Angeles Times has an obit. But Mark Feeney, Globe writer extraordinaire, was inspired to write a piece for this space, and we're grateful. Here is Mark's take...

Most anyone reasonably conversant with the visual arts would recognize the names of three of the four most influential figures in the history of 20th-century photography in America: Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans, and Robert Frank. Far fewer would recognize the name of John Szarkowski, who died Saturday in Pittsfield from complications of a stroke. He was 81.

Like Stieglitz, Evans, and Frank, Szarkowski (pronounced shar-KOFF-ski) was a photographer _ quite a good one, if not a great one. Szarkowski's importance came not from his use of a camera but his thinking about its use. For nearly 30 years, he was curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (1962-1991). The history of that post is not unlike that of left field for the Red Sox _ instead of going from Ted Williams to Carl Yastrzemski to Jim Rice, it was Beaumont Newhall to Edward Steichen to Szarkowski. Szarkowski was the Ted Williams of the three.

It's not just that he organized more than 100 exhibitions. It's not even just the quality of those exhibitions. The "New Documents" show Szarkowski put together for MoMA in 1967 may be second only to MoMA's "Family of Man" show, a decade earlier, for its impact on photography. It made the reputations of not one but three great photographers: Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander. Szarkowski effectively discovered William Eggleston with the exhibition he mounted of his work in 1976. His monumental four-show retrospective of Atget's works may be unsurpassed in photography as the full, rich synoptic presentation of a single career.

Even more than the shows, it was the specific nature of Szarkowski's thinking about photography that was so important. Like Newhall and Steichen, Szarkowski brought to the job the nuts-and-bolts knowledge of a practicing photographer. The second Friday after 9/11, I spent an afternoon sitting with him on the porch of his country house in East Chatham, N.Y. When a photographer came to take his picture, Szarkowski had a grand time swapping stories about taking picutres for advertising displays, as he'd done as a young man in Chicago. ("Put some salt in the beer, and boy, watch that head foam up, hmm?") He was happy talking about bringing his portfolio to Evans' office at Fortune the first time he went to New York. He was really happy talking about the tricks of the trade.

That knowledge informed his view of even the grandest achievements of the medium. "All I was doing was showing the best stuff: those people who could be most profitably stolen from _ like Atget," Szarkowski said that day. "Stolen from": what a great, telling, and absolutely pertinent phrase. What was it T.S. Eliot said? "Mediocre artists borrow, great artists steal"? Szarkowski understood. He also understood that, to quote Eliot again, "The only [critical] method is to be very intelligent." It's hard to exaggerate the robustness of Szarkowski's intellect. The man was blazingly smart _ and he had a prose style worthy of conveying that fire: vivid and precise, muscular and witty. There's a reason such books as "The Photographer's Eye" (1966) and "Looking at Photographs" (1973) remain indispensable. But open at random almost anything he published, and the prose will be superb, the insights wondrously keen. To offer just a single example, he once described Winogrand in his street photography as "hoping for an instant of stasis _ a resolution so gently provisional that it would scarcely seem to halt the efflorescence of change." "Gently provisional": the perfection of that pairing of modifiers is beyond praise.

The catalogues of the many shows Szarkowski organized can't capture the experience of having seen the pictures hung, of course. They remain well worth seeking out, nonetheless, for the superb introductions Szarkowski contributed to so many of them. The single most useful observation I've ever encountered not just about photography but any artistic enterprise was his saying somewhere that "the central act of photography [is] the act of choosing and eliminating."

The fundamentally functionalist attitude was the third element in his influence. Szarkowski may have been the first person to see photography whole. Yes, Atget's work was superior to the snapshots in your parents' photo album _ but both belong to the same medium. It sounds so obvious, but it's a crucially important point, and it defined almost everything Szarkowski did at MoMA. That Friday afternoon on his porch, he spoke of his belief in "the catholicity of the medium . . . the idea that art photography and other photography is all one thing. I don't mean it was all good. I mean it was all one medium. To try to make a distinction on the basis of good intentions was harmful to the medium. If one was going to think of photography, one had to think about it as one piece." That wasn't to dismiss aesthetic discrimination _ not hardly. It was, though, to see how photography in its entirety was different from any previous form of visual art, and thus a crucial means to better understand it.

"Some stuff really is better than other stuff," Szarkowski said. "The reason it's better is it provides more nourishing material for subsequent artists to deal with, hmm? No matter how good a PR you've got, the PR person is eventually going to die. In the long run, the tradition is defined by subsequent artists. . . . Some artists are better than others for that reason. They contribute more, they enrich the pool more, the pool of future possibilities, defining the grounds for subsequent experiment, hmm? Tradition is not a lot of old pictures. It's what we know of what has been achieved so far."

Szarkowski had a remarkable presence. He grew up in rural Wisconsin and had the look of a man used to hard labor: practical, down to earth, decisive. You just knew that when he clicked his camera's shut it really clicked. Sitting, he did not slouch. Walking, he strode. His laugh was chesty and deep. He was the cultural mandarin as drill sergeant _ his presence was that commanding, that vigorous.

Inevitably, the subject of 9/11 came up that afternoon. The world's experience of the fall of the Twin Towers spoke to the limits of the medium he loved. "No matter how many times you see a picture of those planes going into those buildings," he said, "it's always a question, never an answer." He just tossed off the remark, but it seemed to me then _ and it still does now _ as profound an observation about the nature of photography as I've ever heard.

I'm lucky enough to own a few pretty good pictures: an Evans, a couple of Kerteszes, a couple of Helen Levitts. My favorite is a John Gutmann. Forced to choose, though, I'd trade them all for those 3 1/2 hours spent listening to that man sitting on a porch next to an apple orchard on the far side of the Berkshires. No one else has made me see photographs so clearly.

After retiring as director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, John Szarkowski returned to taking and presenting his own photographs. (file 1997/new york times)