John Szarkowski

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John Szarkowski (b. December 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin) is an influential photography curator, historian, and critic. He is also a photographer. From 1962 to 1991 Szarkowski was the Director of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

He grew up in the small northern Wisconsin city of Ashland, and became interested in photography at age eleven. In World War II Szarkowski served in the U.S. Army, after which he graduated in 1948 in Art History from the University of Wisconsin. He then began his career as a museum photographer at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. At this time he was also a practicing art photographer; he had his first solo show at the Walker Art Center in 1949, the first of a number of solo exhibitions. In 1954 Szarkowski received the first of two Guggenheim fellowships, resulting in the book The Idea of Louis Sullivan (1956). Between 1958 and 1962 he returned to rural Wisconsin. There he undertook a second Guggenheim fellowship in 1961, researching into ideas about wilderness and the relationship between people and the land.

Then, in 1962, he was personally picked by Edward Steichen to be Steichen's successor at the Museum of Modern Art. When he arrived in New York, not a single gallery in the city showed fine art photography. He launched the careers of Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, and Lee Friedlander.

In 1974 Szarkowski published Looking at Photographs a practical set of examples on how to write about photographs. The book is still required reading for students of art photography, and argues for the importance of looking carefully and bringing to bear every bit of intelligence and understanding possessed by the viewer. Szarkowski has also published numerous books on individual photographers, including, with Maria Morris Hambourg, the definitive four-volume work on the photography of Atget.

He has taught at Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and New York University, and continues to lecture and teach. In 1990, U.S. News & World Report said: "Szarkowski's thinking, whether Americans know it or not, has become our thinking about photography".

In 1991 Szarkowski retired from his post at the New York Museum of Modern Art, during which he had developed a reputation for being somewhat autocratic, and became the Museum's Photography Director Emeritus. He was succeeded by Peter Galassi, Chief Curator.

In retirement Szarkowski returned to making his own photographic work, mostly attempting to picture a spirit of place in the American landscape. In 2005 he had several major solo exhibitions across the USA. The first retrospective of his work exhibited at MOMA in early 2006.[1]

There is a 48-minute documentary on his life and work: John Szarkowski: A Life in Photography (Checkerboard, 1998). There is also a 60-minute film of a lecture in which he talks about his own photography: Speaking of Art: John Szarkowski on John Szarkowski (Checkerboard, 2005).