You Ought to Be in Pictures
Books that bring photography into focus.
BY RICHARD WOODWARD
Saturday, October 21, 2006
1. "Looking at Photographs" by John
Szarkowski
(Museum of Modern Art, 1973).
Our best writer on photography and one of the nation's finest critics on any subject, John Szarkowski directed the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for 29 years. Read any of his dozens of essays elucidating the work of other photographers (he is a good one himself) and you will be rewarded. Free of academic jargon and avant-garde attitude, his artistic judgments reflect the character of the man, a stubborn American who prefers to figure things out on his own. His book "The Photographer's Eye" (1966) is better known, but this series of extended notations on 100 photographs from MoMA's collection is a distillation of his gifts for witty concision, plenitude of spirit and tact.
2. "Photography in Print" edited by Vicki Goldberg
(Simon & Schuster, 1981).
The "present" in the subtitle "Writings from 1816 to the Present" means 1978, the latest entry in this excellent collection. It still offers the widest compass of perspectives on a vast topic. Essays by Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag and A.D. Coleman should satisfy postmodernists. Interviews with Walker Evans and W. Eugene Smith, as well as statements of high artistic purpose by Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, make the case for the purists. But some of the happiest surprises come from writings by tangential figures such as Oliver Wendell Holmes and George Santayana--and Charles Baudelaire, who loathed photography: "Our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze on its trivial image on a scrap of metal."
3. "Before Photography" by Peter Galassi (Museum of Modern Art, 1981).
Peter Galassi, John Szarkowski's successor at MoMA, explores the origins of photography not as a scientific discovery but as a logical product of the Western artistic tradition. Early 19th-century painters, including Corot, Constable and the Danish realist Christen Kobke, depicted humble subjects and landscape views that seem "caught" by the eye, Mr. Galassi says, presaging a machine that would see everything in front of it indiscriminately. The "syntax of immediate, synoptic perceptions and discontinuous, unexpected forms" that we recognize as the language of photography would perhaps not have happened, in Mr. Galassi's judgment, if many artists had not already begun to picture the world in this revolutionary way.
4. "The Mind's Eye" by Henri Cartier-Bresson (Aperture, 1999).
The "surrealizing bourgeois," as Henri Cartier-Bresson called himself, was a mercurial figure who imparted rigor and grace to everything he touched, from a drawing pencil to his Leica. The fountain pen was no exception. This thin but charming collection is a canonical manifesto of 20th-century art. It includes tributes to fellow photographers ("for me, Robert Capa wore the dazzling matador's costume, but he never went in for the kill"), passing remarks on places he had worked (Russia, Cuba, China) and notes on his own remarkable philosophy of craft. "To take photographs is to hold one's breath when all faculties converge in the face of fleeting reality," he writes. "It is at that moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy."
5. "River of Shadows" by Rebecca Solnit (Viking, 2003).
The conquest of the American West in the 19th century and the growth of northern California as a 20th-century hub of technological creativity can both be traced back, says Rebecca Solnit, to the invention in the 1870s of a super-fast camera shutter and film by the English photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Her tour de force of imaginative scholarship connects railroads, telegraphy, American foreign policy, the multinational corporation and sublime Western landscapes with Muybridge's invention. "Time was at his command as it had never been at anyone's before," she writes. "A new world had opened up for science, for art, for entertainment, for consciousness, and an old world had retreated farther." Muybridge fired the starting gun that announced modernity.
Mr. Woodward is an arts critic, journalist and filmmaker in New York.
Copyright © 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
