The Photographer's Eye

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John Szarkowski
Introduction to the catalog of the exhibition, The Photographer's Eye

enemy."1 And in his own terms of reference Baudelaire was half right; certainly the new medium could not satisfy old standards. The photographer must find new ways to make his meaning clear. These new ways might be found by men who could abandon their allegiance to traditional pictorialstandards—or by the artistically ignorant, who had no old allegiances to break. There have been many of the latter sort. Since its earliest days, photography has been practiced by thousands who shared no common tradition or training, who were disciplined and united by no academy or guild, who considered their medium variously as a science, an art, a trade, or an entertainment, and who were oftenunaware of each other's work. Those who invented photography were scientists and painters, but its professional practitioners were a very different lot. Hawthorne's daguerreotypist hero Holgrave in the house of the seven gables was perhaps not far from typical: "Though now but twenty-two years old, he had already been a country schoolmaster; salesman in a country store; and the political editor of acountry newspaper. He had subsequently traveled as a peddler of cologne water and other essences. He had studied and practiced dentistry. Still more recently he had been a public lecturer on mesmerism, for which science he had very remarkable endowments. His present phase as a daguerreotypist was of no more importance in his own view, nor likely to be more permanent, than any of the precedingones."2 The enormous popularity of the new medium produced professionals by the thousands— converted silversmiths, tinkers, druggists, blacksmiths and printers. If photography was a new artistic problem, such men had the advantage of having nothing to unlearn. Among them they produced a flood of images. In 1853 the New York daily tribune estimated that three
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By John Szarkowski BookFinder.comThe Photographer's Eye
This book is an investigation of what photographs look like, and of why they look that way. It is concerned with photographic style and with photographic tradition: with the sense of possibilities that a photographer today takes to his work. The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process—a process based not on synthesis but on selection. Thedifference was a basic one. Paintings were made —constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes—but photographs, as the man on the street put it, were taken. The difference raised a creative issue of a new order: how could this mechanical and mindless process be made to produce pictures meaningful in human terms—pictures with clarity and coherence and a point of view?It was soon demonstrated that an answer would not be found by those who loved too much the old forms, for in large part the photographer was bereft of the old artistic traditions. Speaking of photography Baudelaire said: "This industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal

Charles Baudelaire, "Salon de 1859," translated by Jonathan Mayne for The Mirror of Art,Critical Studies by Charles Beudeleire London: Phaidon Press, 1955. (Quoted from On Photography, A Source Book of Photo History in Fecsimile, edited by Beaumont Newhall. Watkins Glen, N. Y.: Century House, 1956, p. 106.)

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Nathaniel Hawthorne, The [louse of the Seven Gables. New York: Signet Classics edition, 1961, pp. 156-7.

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million daguerreotypes were being produced that year.3 Some ofthese pictures were the product of knowledge and skill and sensibility and invention; many were the product of accident, improvisation, misunderstanding, and empirical experiment. But whether produced by art or by luck, each picture was part of a massive assault on our traditional habits of seeing. By the latter decades of the nineteenth century the professionals and the serious amateurs were...